


3/ 



^ 





J 



THE 



OKATOKS OF FRANCE : 



TIM ON, 

(viscount DE CORMENIN.) 



TRANSLATED BY 

A MEMBER OF THE NEW YORK BAR ; 

FROM THE XlVth PARIS EDITIONT 

WITH AN 

ESSAY ON THE RISE OF FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY ELOQUENCE, 

AND THE ORATORS OF THE GIRONDISTS, 

BY J. T. HEADLEY: 

EDITED BY G. H. COLTON, 

WITH NOTES AND BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA: 
ILLUSTRATED. 



NEW YORK: 
BAKER AND SCRIBNER 

36 PARK ROW AND 145 NASSAU STREET. 



1847. 



No.l^, 






Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1847, 

BAKER & SCRIBNER, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for 

the Southern District of New York. 



THOMAS B. SMITH, STKRKOTYPER, 
216 WILUAM STREET, N. Y. 



8. W. BENEDICT, PRINTER, 
16 SPRUCE STREET. 



LIST OF PLATES 



FACING. 

I. MiRABEAU, 1 

II. Danton, 3*7 

III. Napoleon, 66 

IV. Ii\MARTINE, ..•••• 241 
V. GuizoT, . . . . . • . 263 

VI. Thiers, 286 



EDITOR'S ADVERTISEMENT. 



Few remarks can be needed, in addition to those which 
the Translator has stated, to explain the objects of introdu- 
cing the Oratorical " Portraits" of Viscount de Cormenin, to 
the American people. So far as the prevalent fever for 
book-making might furnish an explanation, it would be suf- 
ficient to say, that no work issued in Europe for some years 
past, has been more extensively popular than these singular 
and powerful sketches, or " Portraits," as the Author more 
aptly entitles them. They originally appeared at Paris 
under the signature of " Timon," and, with various brilliant 
political pamphlets under the same name, attracted extraor- 
dinary attention. Sixteen or eighteen editions have since 
been published at Paris, and twelve separate editions at 
Brussels ; and by examining the various sketches of the pub- 
lic men of France that have appeared lately in the English 
periodicals, it would be found that many of their most effec- 
tive limnings have been transferred from Cormenin. This 
popularity has been owing, not more to the quality and 
distinction of the characters portrayed, than to the orig- 
inal and striking style of their portraiture. With very 
great and powerful discrimination, a singular logical acute- 
ness, perspicuity, and frequent eloquence, "Timon" dis- 
plays a scornful elegance, a subtile force of sarcasm, and 
grace of badinage, not excelled by any writer since Voltaire. 
It is power, concealed in a garb of lightness — the blow is felt 
when only the rustling of the robes is seen. His skill in 
characterization has not been surpassed. 

Several of the Sketches are of Oratois previous to the 
age of Cormenin. Of these the first tvv^o, of Mirabeau and 
Danton, are, in themselves, among the finest specimens of 
descriptive oratory ; and the third is the only good represen- 
taUon yet given of the extraordinary military eloquence of 
Napoleon. Of the modern Orators, the author's limnings of 
Lamartine, Thiers, Guizot, and O'Connell — the only foreign- 
er admitted to the gallery — will attract particular attention , 
and those of Manuel, Constant, Collard, and others less known 
to us, must be acknowledged models of political portraiture. 

But, aside from the evident popular qualities of the book, 



VIIl EDITORS ADVERTISEMENT. 

two Other considerations had a decisive influence in deter- 
mining their publication in this country. The first is, the 
fact that nearly all our impressions of the men and public 
aflairs of Continental Europe, have been obtained through 
English books and the English press. It is time that we 
should acquaint ourselves with those nations directly, — 
through their own politics and their own literature. Of 
the French literature introduced among us, mereover, we 
have generally had the feeblest and least instructive part. 

The second was a consideration of style, having refer- 
ence to the literary productions of this country. It is a topic 
of common remark, that the style of American authors has 
come to be, in nearly all departments of writing, of too la- 
bored and too uniform a character ; — that in philosophy, law, 
theology, politics, narrative, fiction, addresses, newspaper 
and periodical writing, alike, though grave and forcible, it 
has too little ease and too similar a movement. It needs to be 
broken up : — if so, there can be no readier, or more effective 
way to accomplish this, than by introducing among our Eng- 
lish models, which we have too closely followed, a variety of 
brilliant works from the pens of foreign authors. Our Saxon 
mind possesses, in its earnestness, a most excellent quality ; 
— but it wears its armor too heavily. It does not seem too 
much to hope, that these " Portraits" of " Timon" will 
afl^ect, to a very sensible degree, the future style of the 
writings of this country, especially on all political topics. 
^ The translation was executed by a member of the New 
York Bar, and with a force and aptness of language, it will 
be found, not very common in our versions of foreign 
authors. The Essay, which was needed to illustrate some 
points, on which Cormenin does not touch, as the rise of 
French Revolutionary eloquence, with some notice of the 
Orators of the Girondists, was furnished by Mr. Headley, 
whose studies and writings have made him familiar with 
that period. The only parts supplied by the Editor are 
some fifty pages of " Biographical Addenda," giving more 
dates and particulars in the lives of the most distin- 
guished of Cormenin's subjects, than the author has fur- 
nished— for " Timon" does not so much sketch their lives 
as their characters. The orators, to whom this matter 
relates, are Mirabeau, Danton, Benjamin Constant, Royer 
Collard, Larnartine, Guizot, and Thiers. 

Neto York, May, 1847. The Editor. 



/ 






TRANSLA^Oft'S PREFACE. 



Two or three objects have been principally contemplated 
in the introduction of this celebrated book to the American 
public : they relate to the Nature of the subject, the Execu- 
tion of the original, and the Aim of the translation. 

The importance of the Oratorical art it would doubtless be 
superfluous to urge upon a community wherein, daily, even 
its semblance is seen to command that political considera- 
tion which is accessible only to birth, or to fortune, or (but 
rarer alas !) to wisdom, in other conditions of society : of its 
productive value, at least in this personal respect, our read- 
ers are all sufficiently sensible. But the urgency, espe- 
cially of the public interest, for something more of the real- 
ity, is felt, perhaps, not so generally ; and by fewer still con- 
ceived, the proper mode and means of attaining it. 

To such a situation and purpose nothing could well be 
more suitable than the treatise of de Corbienin ; as should, 
indeed, be expected frorA a man of European distinction in 
nearly all the qualifications, practical as well as theoretical, 
for the task. Of the two Parts, into which it is divided, the 
present publication contains but the Second. The First lays 
down the Principles and Precepts, and in the several species 
of eloquence, the Forensic, Military, Pulpit, Popular as well 
as the Parliamentary — including, also, the " Tactics" of par- 
ties, of deliberative assemblies, of Opposition and Ministerial 
policy ; all which the Portraits, here presented, were meant 
to illustrate by example, in a corresponding series. And 
this was the methodical arrangement, undoubtedly. But 
the inverse order is better adapted, probably, to the readers 
of this translation. And, at all events, the counterpart may 
be expected to follow soon — composing a volume of nearly 
equal size. 



Besides the interest of the matter, the work presents, more- 
over, in its method and style, a consummate model, espe- 
cially for political writing, that is to say the writing which 
is long to remain in chief request in our country. This fea- 
ture must be obvious to the least instructed of the readers. 
It is, in fact, as a writer unapproached in the combination 
of dialectical precision with amplitude of view, of pol- 
ished and even courteous elegance of language with the 
most truculent severity of invective, and of picturesqueness 
of expression with profundity of thought — it is for this that 
the author's name, or rather pseudonyme, is renowned, in 
even Europe, rather than for his qualities, scarce less eminent, 
as statesman and jurist. But more express than his gen- 
eral example, we are furnished, in the didactic part alluded 
to, with a chapter devoted to the regular institution of polit- 
ical writing. 

To evince the deplorable need of amendment in this par- 
ticular also, it is not necessary, and were invidious, to go 
into the actual character of this principal branch of our lit- 
erature. If it have any, oi?e might describe it — a confused 
compost of the hacknied and half-obsolete forms and phrase- 
ology of British journalism and politics, always without sys- 
tem, frequently without signification, utterly without style. 
Evidence of this will occur, indirectly, in the following 
pages, where care has been taken, with this very view, to 
render several terms of the original, chiefly political, ac- 
cording to reason and the analogy, rather than the corrupt 
practice, of our idiom. And if the reader, when his atten- 
tion shall probably be arrested by such as " strange," will, 
instead of dismissing them for French fantasies, but compare 
them intelligently with the word he would have expected 
according to popular usage, he will find this contrast open 
curious gleams into the real condition of much of our politi- 
cal and juridical terminology. It must be suggestive to him 
of still more than this. He will doubtless proceed to ask 
himself, how the French, a people so much younger politi- 
cally than the English race, have yet already come to be 



TRANSLATORSPREPACE. XI 

our masters in the dialects of politics and of administration, 
as well as of fashion and cookery ? The inevitable an- 
swer will lead him to generalize his inference of defective- 
ness, from a special department, to the body, of our language ; 
and will, at the same time, strikingly exhibit, by results of 
fact, what is so difficult of direct demonstration — the im- 
mense and universal advantages of a logical and scientific 
superiority of language. 

To direct the thoughtful reader's attention to this compar- 
ative deficiency, not alone of our political, but also of our 
popular and literary vocabulary, was the third object, above- 
mentioned, proposed by this publication. Or rather, it was 
to inculcate by a slight example, the most efficient, perhaps, 
or at least the most available mode of gradually supplying 
it — I mean intelligent translation. Translation amongst us 
— and the reproach may be extended to England — since it 
has become a mere handcraft, is but a wretched travesty, at 
least in books of the aesthetical kind. Especially is this the 
case with versions from the French, in consequence chiefly 
of the disparity of development alluded to, between the lan- 
guages. Now, this mutilation, besides the implied insult to 
the " reading public" and the flagrant outrage upon the au- 
thor, is censurable, moreover, in neglecting, in abusing, this 
excellent means of amending and enriching the vernacular 
language, excellent especially when the dialect of the origi- 
nal is, like the French, the more advanced. But the ex- 
cuse is ready and recognized. Idiomatic expressions are to 
be insurmountably reverenced, says one of those pedantic 
superstitions which, in language, as well as law, politics 
and the rest, would ever have the manhood of the mind still 
move in the go-car of its infancy. To hear the herd of our 
critics descant upon, as beauties of the language, what are 
really badges of its barbarism — necessarily vulgarities of the 
populace before they became refinements' of the purists — 
do you not fancy a crowd of cripples who, though now 
quite healed by the unconscious overflow of the Siloan wa- 
ters of advancing science, should not only persist in using 



XU TRANSLATORS TREPACE. 

the crutches instead of their legs, but limp about priding 
themselves upon their enlightened preference, and preaching 
it to all around ? 

But the subject is too large for this place. Be the prin- 
ciple as it may, to any one really competent to translate (an 
accomplishment by the way not so common perhaps as most 
people think) these peculiarities of expression can offer lit- 
tle or no difficulty, in dialects come, to the stage of matu- 
rity to own a literature worth translating. To explain 
briefly : Idioms, as they take rise from an extremely con- 
crete state of the language, so tend to disappear with its 
proficiency in generalization ; thus we find no idioms in 
the language of philosophy and science. In the merely 
literary and popular phraseology, the epuration proceeds 
variously, according as they are idioms of phrase, or only 
oi' terms. The former begin to drop off at an earlier stage 
of logical refinement, and fall into utter disuse. Already, 
no English writer would venture to 'use the greater part 
of even the famous idioms of Addison, though still cant- 
ing about them, mechanically, as the last perfections of the 
language. And amongst ourselves, what educated writer or 
talker now employs the American idioms of Sam Slick, for 
example ? — which, however, would no doubt have been, to- 
day, in a fair way of becoming the Addisonian elegancies of 
our men of letters, had our society been left, in anything, 
to the natural growth, and had not the language especially 
been under the wholesome control, or the nipping criticism, 
of British literature. Inaccuracy or uncouthness in our 
translations, then, should find no excuse on the score of idioms 
of this class ; of which any that remain still in use are for the 
most part general maxims of common sense, such as proverbs, 
and susceptible, by reason of this universality, of being ren- 
dered by equivalent, when not by analogical, expressions. 

The idioms of word or term are more permanent and form 
in fact the chief part of the difficulty in question. In these 
the progression operates, not as in the other by decay, but 
by a species of transformation. And the reason is conclu- 



translator's preface. xiii 

give. The idiom of phrase is a comUnation, good for only 
a special purpose, with whicl^t must consequently cease ; 
whereas the word is an element, and thus equally adapts itself 
to other combinations or modifications. Now, it is precisely 
in the imperfect development of these derivative forms, in 
the deficiency of its abstract and generalized vocabulary, 
that our language, and our translators (from the French es- 
pecially) seem both to be at fault. But this is ordinarily 
remediable under the guidance of analogy, and not only so 
legitimately, but laudably. The process has received special 
attention in the following version. And if we duly consider 
the characteristic refinements of style together with the 
evanescent metaphysics of moral portraiture, which make this 
book perhaps the most difficult in any language to translate, 
it will be allowed that the experiment has been put fairly to 
the test. If at all successful, it may lead our translators to 
attempt, or at least the public to- exact, more care in the 
manufacture of this the present, and indeed prospective, sta- 
ple of our original or unpilfered literature. Not, however, 
that I pretend the translation does not remain very suscep- 
tible of improvement, as I have found but too sensibly on a 
running revisal of the proofs. In truth it was done hastily, 
and with the design of ulterior correction, which has been 
precluded by other engagements deemed of more conse- 
quence. At the same time, I do not decline the respon- 
sibility at least of two qualities, which it may look, indeed, 
like satire to profess : The diction is English ; the thought 
is that of the Author, not merely in substance hut even form. 

In avering fidelity, I should in rigor perhaps except a few 
effusions of transcendental democracy ; which, though ex- 
cellent, of course, upon occasion, I took the liberty of sup- 
pressing, at the suggestion of the proverb against " carrying 
coals to Newcastle." 

But here the responsibility of the translator ends. For 
the residue of the contents, the credit (or otherwise) is 
fairly due to the publishers, who, with the friend whose 
name is affixed as editor, have (in consequence of the en- 



XIV TRANSLATORS PREEACE. 

gagements alluded to) discharged me of all attention to 
the details of publication, ^f 

As to the general merits of the work itself, with these few 
observations, I leave them to the readers to appreciate, or 
perhaps only postpone them to the issue of the other volume. 
I close with transcribing from a late Paris Journal (le Na- 
tional) the following notice of the work, announcing the six- 
teenth edition. 

" What remains, at this day, to be said of the Livre des 
Orateurs, except that it has proved a fortune to the publisher, 
and a source of new triumphs to the author : the rapid sale 
of fifteen editions speaks abundantly the opinion of the pub- 
lic. But with M. DE CoRMENiN the editions succeed each 
other without being alike. He touches and retouches un- 
ceasingly his elaborate pages ; he adds, retrenches, trans- 
poses, polishes : he is eminently the writer of the file and 
smoothing-plane [de la lime et du rahot,) a rare merit in our 
days, and which evinces in the author a proper respect for 
both the public and himself. 

" The edition now issued contains some new Portraits, or 
rather outlines, in the modest expression of the author. For 
as soon as an orator appears,, ' Timon' takes his pencil, draws 
a profile, sketches a head, completes a bust according to the 
rank assigned to each in the parliamentary hierarchy. Thus 
does he constantly keep up to the current of parliamentary 
life, though, in truth, at present, neither active nor brilliant. 
And as the sessions march on, the ' Book of the Orators' 
marches with them, advancing daily more and more in pub- 
lic admiration, and above all, in pecuniary productiveness." 

The Translator. 



IJRKARY ) 



RISE AND FALL OF ELOQUENCE IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 




BY J. T. HEAD LEY. 



The end of all eloquence is to sway men. It is 
therefore bound by no arbitrary rules of diction or 
style — formed on no specific models, and governed 
by no edicts of self-selected judges. It is true, there 
are degrees of eloquence, and equal success does not 
imply equal excellence. That which is adapted to 
sway the strongest minds of an enlightened age, ought 
to be esteemed the most perfect, and doubtless should 
be the gauge by which to test the abstract excellence 
of all oratory. But every nation has its peculiar tem- 
perament and tastes, which must be regarded in 
making up our judgments. Indeed, the language it- 
self of different countries compels a widely different 
style and manner. To the cold and immobile Eng- 
lishman, the eloquence of Italy appears like frothy 
declamation ; while to the latter, the passionless man- 
ner, and naked argument of the former, seem tame 
and commonplace. No man of sense would harangue 
the French, with their volatile feelings and love of 
scenic effect, in the same manner he would the Dutch 
their neighbors. A similar contrast often exists in the 
same nation. He who could chain a Boston audience 
by the depth and originality of his philosophy, might 
be esteemed a dreamer in the far West. Colonel 
Crockett and Mr. Emerson would be very unequal 



XVi CHANGES IN TASTE AND STYLE. 

candidates for fame amid our frontier population. A 
similar though not so striking a contrast, exists be- 
tween the North and South. A speech, best adapted 
to win the attention of a mixed southern assembly, 
would be regarded too ornamental, nay, perhaps mer- 
etricious by one in New England. The warm blood 
of a southern clime will bear richer ornament and 
more imaginative style, than the calculating spirit of 
a northern man. The same law of adaptation must 
be consulted in the changes of feeling and taste that 
come over the same people. Once our forefathers 
liked the stern, unadorned old Saxon in which the 
Bible is written, and which characterized the sturdy 
English divines. A few years passed by, and the 
classic era, as it was called, came — that is, a preference 
of Latin-derived words to Saxon, or of harmony to 
strength. Johnson's lofty diction threw Cicero's high- 
sounding sentences into the shade, and Addison's fault- 
less elegance became to language what miniature 
painting is to the art of painting itself. At length 
another generation came, and the strong energetic 
style of Ma caul ay, or the equally strong but uncouth 
sentences of Carlyle, and the concentration of Broug- 
ham, shoved the English classics from the stage. Now 
the man who sighs over this departure from classic 
models, and prates of corrupt English, shows himself 
shallow both in intellect and philosophy. Let him 
mourn over the new spirit that has seized the world — 
there lies the root of the evil, if there be any. Men at 
auction now-a-days will not talk as Dr. Johnson did in 
the sale of Thrale's brewery — nor in the present ear- 
nestness, nay eagerness of human thought and feeling, 
will the fiery Saxon heart sacrifice vigor to beauty- 
directness to harmony. He is a good writer who em- 



LAW OP ADAPTATION. XVll 

bodies in his works the soul and spirit of the times in 
which he hves, provided they are worth embodying — 
and the common sympathy of the great mass is sounder 
criticism by far than the rules of mere scholars, who, 
buried up in their formulas, cannot speak so as to arrest 
the attention or move the heart. 

Adaptation without degeneracy is the great law to 
be followed. 

If the speech of Patrick Henry before the House of 
Delegates had been made when the Stamp Act first 
began to be discussed, it would have been considered 
foolish bluster ; but delivered at the very moment when 
the national heart was on fire, and needed but a touch 
to kindle it into a blaze, it was the perfection of elo- 
quence. So, the speech that Sir Walter Scott puts 
into the mouth of Ephraim Macbriar, on one of the 
successful battle fields of the Covenanters, is in itself a 
piece of wild declamation, but in the circumstances 
under which it was delivered, and to secure the object 
in view, the truest oratory. As the young preacher 
stood, pale with watchings and fastings and long im- 
prisonment, and cast his faded eye over the field of 
slaughter, and over those brave men whose brows 
were yet unbent from the strife, he knew that reason 
and argument would be lost in the swelling passions 
that panted for action, and he burst forth into a ha- 
rangue that thrilled every heart, and sent every hand 
to its sword : — and wdien he closed, those persecuted 
men " would have rushed to battle as to a banquet, 
and embraced death with rapture." 

When the national heart is heaving with excite- 
ment, he who would control its pulsations and direct 
its energies, must speak in the language of enthusiasm. 
The power of an orator lies in the sympathy between 



XVlll THREE DEPART xMENTS OF ORATORY. 

him and the people. This is the chord which binds 
heart to heart, and when it is struck, thousands burst 
into tears or rouse into passion, Hke a single indi- 
vidual. 

If these principles be true, it is necessary to throw 
ourselves into the scenes of the French Revolution, in 
order to judge correctly of the orators who controlled' 
it. The Duke of Wellington, addressing the English 
army in India in the language Bonaparte used to his 
troops at the base of the Pyramids, would be guilty of 
ridiculous bombast ; but in the mouth of the latter, and 
to such men as followed his standard, it exhibited the 
true orator. Nelson saying to his crew before the 
battle of Trafalgar, " England expects every man to 
do his duty," and Cromwell reading the Psalms of 
David to his steel-clad Ironsides before the battle of 
Naseby, present a widely different appearance, but 
show equal skill and art. 

In ordinary times, there are three great departments 
of oratory : the bar, the parliament, and the pulpit. 
The latter, no doubt, ought to take the highest rank. 
With three worlds for a field from which to gather 
thoughts, images and motives to action — with the soul 
of man, its hopes, fears and sympathies, and awful des- 
tiny, its theme — it embraces all that is great and fear- 
ful and commanding. But in Catholic countries it has 
sunk into neglect. Hooded over and fettered by su- 
perstition, and wrapped in endless forms, its power is 
lost. This country is fast following in their footsteps. 
Inspiration is gone, enthusiasm derided or shunned, 
and good, plain instruction has usurped the place of 
eloquence. 

In the legislative hall, powerful appeals to the feel- 
ings are dangerous, for the watchful eye of opposition 



THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY. XIX 

is ever ready to make bathos of pathos. At the bar, 
oratory is apt to become mere acting. The habit of 
taking any side, and advocating directly opposite prin- 
ciples, destroys the earnestness of sincere feeling, and 
compels the pleader to resort to art for success. Like 
a fine actor, he must study the hearts of others, and 
not trust to his own impulses, if he would awaken sym- 
pathy. 

But the advocate and the divine disappeared in the 
French Revolution, and the press and legislative hall 
were the media through which the soul of the nation 
uttered itself. 

The Convention of the States-General, and final or- 
ganization of the National Assembly, fixed irretrieva- 
bly the French Revolution. The deputies of the, peo- 
ple, assembled from every quarter of France, found 
themselves at the outset in collision with the throne 
and aristocracy. The nation was to be saved from 
the famine, and distress, and bankruptcy, which threat- 
ened to overthrow it; and. they boldly entered on the 
task. They had not come together to speak, but to 
act. Met at every turn by a corrupt Court and nobi- 
lity, they found themselves compelled to spend months 
on the plainest principles of civil liberty. But facts 
were more potent than words, and it needed only an 
eloquent tongue in order to bind the Assembly toge- 
ther, and encourage it to put forth those acts which 
the welfare of the nation demanded. 

It was not easy at once to destroy reverence for the 
throne, and set at nought royal authority, yet the ref- 
ormations which the state of the kingdom rendered 
imperative would do both. Right onward must this 
National Assembly move, or France be lost! To 
carry it thus forward, united, strong and bold, one all- 



XX MIRABEAU. 

powerful tongue was sufficient, — and the great orator 
of the Assembly was Mirabeau. At the outset, hurl- 
ing nningled defiance and scorn both on the nobility, 
from whom he had been excluded, and the king, who 
thought to intimidate the deputies, he inspired the 
Tiers- Etat with his own boldness. No matter what 
vacillation or fears might agitate the members, when 
his voice of thunder shook the hall in which they sat, 
every heart grew determined and resolute. With 
his bushy black hair standing on end, and his eye flash- 
ing fire, he became at once the hope of the people and 
the terror of the aristocracy. Incoherent and un- 
wieldy in the commencement of his speech, steady 
and strong when fairly under motion, he carried re- 
sistless power in his appeals. As a huge ship in a 
dead calm rolls and rocks on the heavy swell, but the 
moment the wind fills its sails stretches proudly away, 
throwing the foam from its front, — so he tossed irreg- 
ular and blind upon the sea of thought, until caught by 
the breath of passion, when he moved majestically, ir- 
resistibly onward. 

The Constituent Assembly of France sat from 1789 
^,0 1791. The overthrow of the Bastile and triumph 
3f the people frightened the nobility, so that they fled 
in crowds from France. Hitherto they had consti- 
tuted the opposition against which the deputies of the 
people had to struggle. After their flight, there being 
no longer an opposition, the deputies naturally split 
into two parties among themselves. The Girondists 
were at first the republicans, and demanded a govern- 
ment founded on the principles of the ancient repub- 
lics; but a faction springing up more radical than 
their own, and pushing the state towards anarchy, 



THE GIRONDISTS. XXt 

they became conservatives. In the meantime Mira- 
beau, full of forebodings, died. 

This Assembly, however, lasted but nine months, 
for the revolt of the 10th of August came ; the Tuil- 
eries ran blood, and the Bourbon dynasty closed. The 
Legislative Assembly then changed itself into the Con- 
vention, and the great struggle between the Girondists 
and Jacobins commenced. It was a life and death 
struggle, and all the mental powers of these two 
bodies were brought to the task. The Girondists em- 
braced in their number some of the finest orators 
France has ever produced. They were the philoso- 
phers of the Revolution, ever talking of Greece and 
Rome, and fondly dreaming that the glorious days of 
those ancient republics could be recalled. Their elo- 
quence had given immense popularity to the Revolu- 
tion and hastened it on. Grand and generous in their 
plans, they filled the imaginations of the people with 
beautiful but unreal forms. But while they were thus 
speaking of Cataline and Cicero, and Brutus and Cas- 
sar, and the heroes of Greece, the Jacobins were talk- 
ing of aristocrats in Paris, and arousing the passions 
rather than exciting the imaginations of men. 

There could be no combination of circumstances 
better adapted to call forth the spirit and power of the 
nation, than that in which France now found herself. 
The fall of the throne, and sudden rising of a republic 
in its place — the removal of all those restraints which 
had for ages fettered thought — the terrific events that 
had just passed, and the still more terrible ones at the 
door — the vast field opened at once to the untried 
powers — the dark and troubled sea rolling around this 
phantom republic, blazing with artificial light; nay, 
the excited soul itself— called on man trumpet-tongued, 



XXli WAKING UP THE FRENCH MIND. 

to give his greatest utterance. Into this new freedom 
the emancipated spirit stepped with a bewildered look, 
and stretching forth its arms, giant-like, made every- 
thing hitherto stable and steady, rock and shake on its 
ancient foundations. Never before was . the human 
mind roused to such intense action, and never did it 
work with such fearful rapidity and awful pov/er. 
The hall of the National Convention became the thea- 
tre of the most exciting scenes ever witnessed in a 
legislative body. The terrible struggle between an- 
cient despotism and young and fierce democracy had 
closed, and the throne gone down in the tumult. The 
elements which had been gathering into strength for 
ages — the swell which had not been born of a sudden 
gust of passion, but came sweeping from the realms 
of antiquity had burst, and there lay the fragments of 
a strong monarchy — the splendid wreck of a system 
hoary with age and rich with the fruits of oppression. 
Into this chaos the soul of France was cast, and be- 
gan to work out its own ends. In the meantime, 
Europe, affrighted at the apparition of a new republic 
rising in its midst, based on fallen kingship, moved to 
arms, and trusted, with one fell blow, to overthrow it. 
All the great interests of life — everything that kindles 
feeling and passion — awakens thought and stimulates 
to action, were here gathered together; and no wonder 
the genius of France burst forth wdth astonishing 
splendor! Grecian art and learning were the offspring 
of the struggle between the young republic of Greece 
and Persian despotism ; and out of the desperate re- 
sistance of early Rome to the efforts put forth for 
her overthrow, sprung that power which finally over- 
shadowed the earth ; while from our own Revolution 
emerged the spirit of enterprise of which the history 



VERGNIAUD. XXlll 

of the race furnishes no parallel, and those principles 
destined to make the tour of the world. 

But if the French Revolution gave birth to grand 
displays of genius and intellect, it also furnished ex- 
hibitions of human depravity and ferocity never before 
equalled. 

The chief leaders that entered this great arena, Mrere 
Robespiere, Danton, Marat, Camille Desmouhns, Va- 
rennes, St. Just, and Collot d'Herbois, on the side of 
the Radicals, or Mountain — Vergniaud, Guadet, Gen- 
sonne, Lanjuinais, Roland, Barbaroux, Louvet, and 
others, on that of the Girondists. The collision be- 
tween these noble and eloquent men, on the one side, 
and those dark, intriguing, desperate characters on 
the other, produced the finest specimens of oratory 
ever witnessed in France. Vergniaud, generous and 
noble — too good to believe in the irredeemable de- 
pravity of his adversaries — was the most eloquent 
speaker that ever mounted the tribune of the French 
Assembly. Carried away by no passion — not torrent- 
like, broken, and fragmentary, as Mirabeau— but like 
a deep and majestic stream, he moved steadily onward, 
pouring forth his rich and harmonious sentences in 
strains of impassioned eloquence. At the trial of 
Louis his speech thrilled both Jacobins and Conser- 
vatives with electric power. On the occasion of 
the failure of the first conspiracy of the Jacobins 
against the Girondists, he addressed the Convention, 
and in his speech occurred the following remarkable 
words : " We march from crimes to amnesties, and 
from amnesties to crimes. The great body of citizens 
are so blinded by their frequent occurrence, that they 
confound these seditious disturbances with the grand 
national movement in favor of freedom — regard the 



XXIV LOU VET. 

violence of brigands as the efforts of energetic minds, 
and consider robbery itself as indispensable to public 
safety. You are free, say they ; but unless you think 
like us, we will denounce you as victims to the ven- 
geance of the people. You are free ; but unless you 
join us in persecuting those whose probity or talents 
we dread, we will abandon you to their fury. Citi- 
zens, there is too much room to dread that the Revolu- 
tion, like Saturn, will necessarily devour all its pro- 
geny, and finally leave only despotism, with all the 
calamities which it produces." A prophecy which 
soon proved true ; and he was among the first of those 
children which the Revolution, Saturn-hke, devoured. 
Thrown into prison with his compatriots, he finally 
underwent the farce of a trinl, and was sentenced to 
the guillotine. His friends had secretly provided him 
with poison, by which he could escape the ignominy 
of the scaffold, and die a sudden and easy death. But 
he nobly refused to take it, preferring to suffer with 
his friends. On the last night of his life he addressed 
his fellow-prisoners on the sad fate of the French 
Republic. He spoke of its expiring liberty, of the 
bright hopes soon to be extinguished in blood, of 
the terrible scenes before their beloved country, in 
terms that made the doomed victims forget their ap- 
proaching fate. Never before did those gloomy walls 
ring to such thrilling words. Carried away by the 
enthusiasm of his feelings, and the picture that rose 
before his excited imagination, he poured forth such 
strains of impassioned eloquence, that they all fell in 
tears in each other's arms. 

Louvet was bold and energetic, hurling his accusa- 
tions against Marat and Robespierre with equal daring 
and power. When the latter, wincing under the im- 



GUADET AND BARBAROUX. XXV 

plied charges conveyed by Roland in a speech before 
the Convention, mounted the Tribune and exclaimed : 
" No one will dare accuse me to my face," Louvet 
rose to his feet, and fixing on him a steady eye, said, 
in a firm voice : " / am ho, wJio accuses you ; yes, 
Robespierre, I accuse you." He then went on in a 
strain of fervid eloquence, following Robespierre, as 
Cicero did Cataline, in all his devious ways — to the 
Jacobin club, to the municipal authorities and the As- 
sembly ever vaunting of his services, exciting the 
people to massacre, and spreading terror and death 
on every side — and closed up with " the glory of the 
revolt of the 10th of August is common to all, but the 
glory of the massacres of September 2nd to you; on 
you and your associates may they rest forever ^ 

After the revolution which overthrew the Girond- 
ists, he fled to the mountains of Jura, and wandered 
for months amid their solitudes and caverns, pondering 
over the strange scenes through which he had passed. 

Guadet was full of spirit — seizing with the intuition 
of genius the changes of the stormy Convention and 
moulding it to his purpose. He died with the firm- 
ness of an old Roman on the scafibld. 

Barbaroux was fiery, prompt and penetrating. Fore- 
seeing clearly the course of the Jacobins, he strove 
manfully to crush them, and would have succeeded 
had he been sustained by his friends. On that last 
terrible day to the Girondists, when eighty thousand 
armed men stood arrayed in dark columns around the 
Hall of the Convention, and a hundred and sixty pieces 
of artillery were slowly advancing with lighted matches 
trembling above them, and the tocsin was sounding and 
generale beating, and cannon thundering in the dis- 
tance, and the Convention tossing like a shattered ves- 



XXVI ROBESPIERRE AND DANTON. 

sel in a storm, he rose, and sending his fearless voice 
over the tempest, exclaimed: ''I have sworn to die at 
my post ; I will keep my oath. Bend, if you please, 
before the Tnunicipality — you who refused to arrest 
their wickedness ; or else imitate us yohom their fury 
immediately demands — wait and brave their fury. 
You may compel me to sink under their daggers — 
you shall not make me fall at their feet.^^ 

Roland clear and truthful — Gensonne, firm, resolute, 
and decided— Lanjuinais, intrepid, and fearless, lifting 
his voice, even when dragged by violence from the 
Tribune — Brissot and Buzot helped to complete this 
galaxy of noble and eloquent men. 

On the other hand, Robespierre combatted these 
bursts of eloquence by his daring plans — insinuating, 
yet energetic, discourse — his terse, vigorous sentences, 
and his character as a patriot. Danton was like a 
roused lion, and his voice of thunder fell with startling 
power on the Convention. Once when he heard the 
tocsin sounding and cannon roaring, he said, all that is 
required is "boldness, boldness, boldness !" and this, with 
his relentless severity, was the secret of his strength. 
Marat, with the face of a monster and the heart of a 
fiend, had that art, or rather ferocity, which appeals to 
hate, murder and revenge. With such energetic, pow- 
erful minds locked in mortal combat, no wonder there 
were bursts of unsurpassed eloquence — thrilling ap- 
peals, noble devotion, such as never before shook a 
parliament. The fact that the Legislative Assembly 
constituted one body, thus keeping the exciting topics 
of this most exciting time ever revolving in its midst, 
conspired to give greater intensity to the feelings, and 
preserve that close and fierce collision from which fire 
is always struck. In halls of legislation the eloquence 



THE FRENCH MIND. XXVll 

of feeling — the spontaneous outbursts of passion con- 
stituting the highest kind of impassioned oratory, are 
seldom witnessed. But here the impulses were not 
restrained — each uttered what he felt, and that lofty 
daring which will of itself create genius, characterized 
the leaders. 

But when the Jacobins through their appeals to the 
passions, triumphed, and the Girondists were dispersed 
or executed, the eloquence of the Convention departed 
forever. In the Reign of Terror, Danton was the 
chief orator, but action, action was wanted more than 
speeches. To awe, to terrify, to crush, was now the 
task of the Convention, and it went on destroying with 
a blind fury until at last it began to destroy itself At 
length it turned fiercely on Danton its head, and that 
voice, after uttering its last challenge, hurling its last 
curse and scorn, was hushed by the guillotine. Robes- 
pierre soon followed, and the yell of terror he gave on 
the scaffold, as the bandage was torn from his maimed 
jaw, letting it fall on his breast, was the last time his 
tongue froze the hearts of the people with fear. 

The Revolution now began to retrograde, and the 
French mind, which had been so terribly excited, for 
awhile stood paralyzed, and the tongue was dumb. 
Nothing shows the difference betweken the two na- 
tions, France and England, more clearly than the con- 
trast this Revolution presented to that of the English 
under Cromwell. In both the commons of the people 
came in collision with the throne, and conquered. In 
both the kijig perished on the scaffold, and the Par- 
Hament seized supreme power. Yet in the one case 
no atrocity marked the progress of freedom — even civil 
law remained in full force amid the tumult and vio- 
lence before which the royal dynasty disappeared. 
The minds of the two nations are as different as the 



XXVIU BONAPARTE. 

progress and results of the two Revolutions. The 
French excitable and imaginative, no sooner seize a 
theory than they push it to the extremest limit. En- 
thusiasm and hope guide the movement, v^^hile reason 
and conscience control the passions of the English 
people. One dreams, the other thinks ; hence to the 
former, eloquence v^^hich appeals to the imagination 
and feelings is the truest and the best. The Tiers- 
Etat, now assembled in Berlin, will not move on to 
freedom as did that of France. The Germans are 
more sober, reflecting and cautious. This fact should 
be kept in mind in reading the speeches of French 
orators. Those things which would be extravagancies 
to an English or Dutch, are not to a French parlia- 
ment. Bursts of sentiment which would draw tears 
from the latter, would provoke a smile of incredulity 
or derision in the former. The mathematician and 
the poet are to be moved by different appeals. 

Under the Directory there was but little display of 
eloquence, and scarcely none at all under the Empire. 
When Bonaparte mounted to supreme power, he 
wished to be the only speaker, as he was the only ac- 
tor, in France. He established the strictest censor- 
ship both over the press and the tongue, and men dared 
not speak, except to echo him. If France was amazed 
at the disappearance of the throne and aristocracy, 
and sudden rising of a republic, with all its blinding, 
dazzling light, in their place, she was no less so at the 
vast empire that sprung up so rapidly at the touch of 
Napoleon. Men spoke no more of Greece or of Rome, 
except to hint at Csesar and his legions. " Rights of 
the people," " freedom of the press and speech," and 
all those spell- words by which the revolutionary lead- 
ers had gained power were forgotten, and the " glory 
of France" absorbed every other thought. To this 



THE RESTORATION. Xxix 

boundless enthusiasm, Napoleon knew how to address 
himself, and became at once the greatest military ora- 
tor of the world. In any other time, and to any other 
army, his speeches would have been mere declama- 
tion, but taking both into consideration they are models 
of oratory. He could speak with power, for his ac- 
tions were eloquent, and stirred the heart of France to 
its core. 

The Restoration brought a great change over the 
parliament of France. From a constitutional mon- 
archy she had passed into a free republic, thence into 
the rudest anarchy that ever shook the world, thence 
into a vast and glorious empire, and now, fallen, ex- 
hausted, and bewildered, sunk back into the arms of a 
Bourbon. And when the representatives of the peo- 
ple again assembled, there were delegates from all 
these great epochs,— royalist emigrants, filled more 
than ever with the idea of the divine right of kings- 
old soldiers from Napoleon's victorious armies,"still 
dreaming of glory— and ardent republicans, who 
would not, for all that had passed, abandon their lib- 
eral principles. 

The new Parliament at length settled down into 
three political parties — the Legitimists, who reverenced 
kingship, and prated constantly of the throne and its 
prerogatives, and the aristocracy and its privileges — ■ 
the Constitutionalists, or those who wished to establish 
the supremacy of the parliament balanced by royal 
authority and other powers, as in England— and the 
Liberals. These discordant elements brought to the 
surface a group of statesmen and orators as different 
in their views and opinions, as if they had been men 
of different ages of the world. The Liberalists con- 
stituted the opposition, and numbered among its lead- 
ers, Manuel, General Foy, Benjamin Constant, Lafitte, 



XXX PRESENT FRENCH PARLIAMENT. 

Bignon, Casimir-Perier, and others. Under Charles X. 
it was a struggle of reason against blind devotion to 
old rules and forms. At length the last gave v/oy — 
Charles X. w^as compelled to abdicate, and the Revo- 
lution of 1830 introduced a nev^^ order of things, v^hich 
still continues. 

It is useless to speak of the present Parliament of 
France. Like the American Congress, or the British 
Parliament, it is governed by the spirit of the politi- 
cian, rather than the elevated views of the statesman, 
or the devotion of the patriot. Between the different 
parties it is a struggle of tactics rather than of intel- 
lect — votes are carried, and changes wrought, more 
by the power of machinery than the power of truth 
or eloquence. The Chamber of Peers is almost a nul- 
lity, while over that of the deputies the politic Louis 
Philippe holds a strong and steady hand. Guizot and 
Thiers have occupied the most prominent place in the 
public eye, under the present dynasty. But the strat- 
egy of parliaments is now of more consequence and 
interest than their speeches, for management is found 
to secure votes better than they. This is natural — in 
unexciting times everything assumes a business form 
and is conducted on business principles — and com- 
merce, and finance, and tariff, and trade, are not cal- 
culated to develop the powers of the orator, or call 
forth the highest kind of eloquence. 



j^^i^ 



■-:.. 



ORAToTFts OF Prance. 



CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY. 
M I R A B E A U . 

As Christopher Columbus, after having traversed a vast 
extent of ocean, was advancing tranquilly towards the con- 
tinent of America, all of a sudden the wind blows, the light- 
ning flashes, the thunder mutters, the cordage is rent, the 
pilot alarmed, and the vessel is on the verge of being lost, 
of being engulfed in the waves. ^ But Columbus himself, 
while his soldiers and sailors gave themselves up to prayer 
and to despair, confiding in his high destinies, seized the helm, 
steered through the roarings of the tempest and the horrors 
of the deep night, and feeling the prow of his vessel ground 
upon the shores of the New World, he cried with a loud 
voice : " Land ! land !" So, when the Revolution was losino- 
its course with started anchors and torn sails, upon a rocky 
and tempestuous sea, Mirabeau taking his stand on the fore- 
deck, bade defiance to the flashing of the thunderbolt, and 
cheering the trembling passengers, raised in the midst of 
them his prophetic voice, and pointed them out the promised 
land of liberty. 

All things concurred to make Mirabeau the grand poten- 
tate of the tribune, his peculiar organization, his life, his 
studies, his domestic broils, the extraordinary times in which 
he appeared, the spirit and manner of deliberation of the 
Constituent Assembly, and the ccmbination truly marvellous 
of his oratorical faculties. It is requisite, in an assembly 
of twelve hundred legislators, that the orator should be dis- 
cernible from a distance, and Mirabeau was discernible 
from a distance. It is' requisite that he be audible from a 



2 c; (J M ri T 1 1' U i: N T ASSEMBLY. 

distance, and Mirabeau was thus audible. It is requisite 
that the details of his physiognomy should disappear in the 
general expression, that the internal man be revealed in 
the features, and that the grandeur of the soul be trans- 
fused into tlic countenance and the discourse. But Mira- 
beau had this general expression, those features, that soul. 
Mirabeau in the tribune was the most imposing of orators : 
an orator so consummate, that it is harder to say what he 
wanted than wliat he possessed. 

Mirabeau had a massive and square obesity of figure, thick 
lips, a forehead broad, bony, prominent ; arched eyebrows, 
an eagle eye, cheeks flat and somewhat flabby, features full 
of pock-holes and blotches, a voice of thunder, an enormous 
mass of hair, and the face of a lion. 

Born with a frame of iron and a temperament of flame, 
he transcended the virtues and the vices of his race. The 
passions took him up almost in his cradle, and devoured him 
throughout his life. His exuberant faculties, unable to work 
out their development in the exterior world, concentrated 
inwardly upon themselves. There passed within him an 
agglomeration, a laboring, a fermentation of all sorts of in- 
gredients, like the volcano which condenses, amalgamates, 
fuses and brays its lava torrents before hurling them into 
the air through its flaming mouth. Greek and Latin litera- 
ture, foreign languages, mathematics, philosophy, music, he 
learned all, retained all, was master of all. Fencing, swim- 
ming, horsmanship, dancing, running, wrestling, all exer- 
cises were familiar to him. The vicissitudes which the for- 
tunate philosophers of the age had merely depicted, he had 
experienced. He had proudly looked despotism, paternal and 
ministerial, in the face, without fear and without submission. 
Poor, a fugitive, an exile, an outlaw, the inmate of a prison, 
every day, every hour of his youth was a fault, a passion, a 
study, a strife. Behind the bars of dungeons and bastilles, 
with pen in hand and brow inclined over his books, he 
stowed the vast repositories of his memory with the richest 
and most varied treasures. His soul was tempered and re- 



MIR AB E A tr. 3 

tempered in hLs indignant attacks upon tyranny, like those 
steel weapons that are plunged in water, while still red from 
the furnace. 

While the rest of the aristocratic youth were dissipating 
their days in stupid and frivolous debauchery, he was cour- 
ageously struggling against man and against fortune. His 
soul, fortified rather than revolted by injustice and arbitrary 
wrong, grew resolute in presence of obstacles ; his intellect, 
sharpened by misfortune, abounded in expedients and con- 
trivances. What variety of stratagems ! what fertility of 
resources ! what height of daring ! what depth of sagacity ! 
How escape from his father ; from the police ; from his en- 
emies ?— how fly, and by what means ? — how live alone ? — 
how above all support a companion ? — how obtain an ap- 
peal from his capital sentence ?— how touch his father to 
compassion, without the preliminary of separating from his 
mistress ? — how avoid separating from her, if he would re- 
turn to his wife ? — how execute this separation without de- 
grading her, without driving her to despair?— how meet 
such a succession of ever-springing wants ? — how parry so 
many perplexities of situation, so many exigencies, so many 
delicacies, so many dangers ?— how plead positions the con- 
trary of one another without flaw of logic and without breach 
of morality? He doubles, he multiplies himself; he de- 
fends himself and he attacks by turns ; he supplicates, threat- 
ens ; he writes and speaks, speaks in his own cause like a 
lawyer, without being a lawyer, better than a lawyer, in 
short as Mirabeau alone could speak. Immoral defense, no 
doubt ! situation false and sophistical ; days without repose, 
nights without sleep ; tempestuous life bestrewn with shoals 
and wrecks; efforts ever strained, sometimes succeeding, 
commonly failing ! But in a single heart, what lessons of 
the human heart ! and in that head, what elaboration of 
mind ! what fecundation ! what fruits ! How well he could 
adapt himself, insinuate himself, rise to haughtiness, stoop 
to humility, take every tone of composition, whether he 
paints to Sophie, in lines of fire, the passionate torments of 



4 CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY. 

his soul, or, at a later period, writes the people of Marseilles 
a letter on the high price of corn, which is a little master- 
piece of popular good sense, precise calculation and exposi- 
tory simplicity ! 

Every where, in every thing, already Mirabeau reveals 
himself; — in his letters, in his pleadings, in his memorials, 
in his treatises on arbitrary imprisonments, on the liberty of 
the press, on the privileges of the nobility, on the inequality 
of distinctions, on the financial affairs and the situation of 
Europe : enemy of every abuse, vehement, polemic, bold 
reformer ; more remarkable, it is true, for elevation, hardi- 
hood, and originality of thought, for sagacity of observation, 
and vigor of reasoning, than for the graces of form ; verbose, 
even loose, incorrect, unequal, but rapid and picturesque in 
style, — a spoken, not a written style, as is that of most 
orators. With what masculine eloquence he objurgates the 
King of Prussia ! " Do but what the son of your slave will 
have done ten times a day, ten times better than you, the 
courtiers will tell you you have performed an extraordinary 
action. Give full reign to your passions, they will tell you 
you do well. Squander the sweat and the blood of your 
subjects like the water of the rivers, they will say you 
do well. If you descend to avenge yourself, — you so pow- 
erful, — they will say you do well. They have said so, when 
Alexander, in his drunkenness, tore open with his piognard 
the bosom of his friend. They have said so, when Nero 
assassinated his mother." 

Is not this in the oratorical style ? 

The orator is equally discovered in his letter of thanks 
to the Tiers-etat of Marseilles. " O Marseilles ! ancient, 
august city, asylum of liberty, may the regeneration which 
now awaits the kingdom, shed upon thee and thine all the 
choicest of its blessings ! Language fails me to tell thee 
either what I feel or what I think ; but a heart remains to 
me, — that heart is inexhaustible, and you have ardently and 
enduringly its best wishes !" 

On the other hand, is it not a marvel to find him, in times 



M 1 11 A JB E A U . 5 

SO backward, present already, in the name of the Commons, 
to the Assembly {Etats) of Provence, the basis of universal 
suffrage and representative government ? " When a nation 
is too numerous to come together in a single assembly, it 
forms several bodies, and the individuals of each particular 
body delegate to one of their number the right of voting in 
their behalf. — Every representative is, by consequence, the 
result of election. The collection of representatives is the 
nation, and all those who are not representatives, must have 
been so, by the fact alone that they are represented. — There 
should not be an individual in the nation who is not either 
elector or electee, representing or represented." Would it 
not be said that Mirabeau had already discovered, or rather 
created, by an effort of his precursory genius, the form, the 
definitions, and the terms of political language ? Let us re- 
capitulate, for his life has several phases ; let us recapitulate 
Mirabeau at this stage of his career. 

He had lived a life of suffering and study in the bas- 
tilles, experienced the rigors and privations of exile, written 
politics, framed codes, pleaded his own causes, prepared 
memorials, espoused the cause of the multitude, broken 
with his cast, frequented the ministers, visited England, 
studied Switzerland, resided in Holland, observed in Prus- 
sia. At once a man of study and a man of pleasure, a 
soldier, a prisoner of state, a victim of tyranny, a man of 
letters, a statesman, a diplomatist, a courtier, a demagogue ; 
he had meditated, suffered, compared, judged, leo-islated, 
])ublished books, pronounced orations. His parliamentary 
education had been completed, before the Parliament itself 
was in existence. He at the outset spoke fluently the 
political dialect, which his colleagues only lisped. He spoke 
it better than the advocates of the bar, — better than the 
preachers of the pulpit. He was an orator- before any one 
suspected it, perhaps before even he knew it himself. He 
was destined to become speedily the leader, no less than 
the orator of the Constituent Assembly, the prince of the 

modern tribune, the very god of eloquence, and, to say all 

1* 



6 C O N ri '1' I T U E N T ASSEMBLY. 

in a word, the grand impersonation of the Revolution of 
1789. 

The Revolution of 1789 has been the great event of 
modern times. The philosophers by their writings, the 
Parliaments by their resistances, the court by its insane 
prodigalities, the clergy by its excessive wealth, the people 
by its misery, the financial establishment by its bankrupt- 
cies, legislation by its abuses, civilization by its progress, 
England and the United States by their example, — all por- 
tended the approach of a catastrophe. 

The old social structure of our fathers had run to decay 
from top to bottom. As portions of the edifice were strip- 
ped to be repaired, it was found to be all gnawn by worms 
and undermined by time. Accordingly, as soon as the 
hammer of the demolisher had detached a few stones, the 
walls shook throughout, and the fabric fell to pieces. All 
was confusion amid the ruins, when the States-General 
were convoked. A general cry arose to demand, that there 
should noimore be divers stories superposited one upon an- 
other, neither spacious apartments for one or a few persons, 
nor small ones for a multitude of men ; that thenceforth the 
edifice should not belong to a single proprietor, but to all 
the inhabitants of the States, and that their delegates should 
be charged to provide for the re-construction, insurance, 
and furnishing of the new social mansion. Mirabeau step- 
ped forth upon the course like a giant, and the ground 
trembled beneath his footsteps. A noble, he leads to battle 
the Tiers-etat against the nobility, who had imprudently 
driven him from their ranks. He compares himself to 
Gracchus, proscribed by the Roman senate. " Thus," said 
he, " perished the last of the Gracchi by the hands of the 
patricians. But, having received the mortal blov/, he flung 
a handful of dust towards heaven, attesting the avenging 
g(Ws, and from this dust arose Marius — Marius less great 
in having exterminated the Cimbri, than in having quelled 
in Rome the aristocracy of the nobility !" There is not in 
antiquity a passage more oratorical. Furthermore, all this 



MIRABEAU. 7 

discourse is of a high order of eloquence, and it terminates 
with this beautiful prophecy : 

'' Privileges must have an end. but the people is eternal." 

This lofty reply made his adversaries quake, and Mira- 
beau threw himself without more reserve into the paths of 
democracy. Once upon this ground he tempered it, he 
solidified it under his feet, he took his position, and wrestled 
as the popular champion, against the Orders of Clergy and 
Nobility, with all the power of his logic, and all the energy 
of his indomitable will. 

It is vulgarly imagined that the force of Mirabeau con- 
sisted in the dewlaps of his bullish neck, in the thick masses 
of his lion-like hair ; that he swept down his adversaries by 
a swing of his tail ; that he rolled down upon them with the 
roarings and fury of a torrent ; that he dismayed them by 
a look ; that he overwhelmed them with the bursts of his 
thunder-like voice : this is to praise him for the exterior 
qualities of port, voice, and gesture, as we would praise a 
gladiator or a dramatic actor ; it is not to praise as he ought 
to be praised this great orator. Doubtless Mirabeau owed 
a great deal, at the outset of his oratorical career, to the 
prestige of his name. For he was already master of the 
Assembly by the reputation of his eloquence, before he be- 
came so by his eloquence itself. 

Doubtless Mirabeau owed much to that penetrating, flex- 
ible, and sonorous voice which used to fill with ease the 
ears of twelve hundred persons, to those haughty accents 
which infused life and passion into his cause, to those im- 
petuous gestures, which flung to his affi'ighted adversaries 
defiances that dared them to reply. Doubtless he owed 
much to the inferiority of his rivals ; for in his presence the 
other celebrities were effaced, or rather they were grouned 
as satellites about this magnificent luminary only to riender 
it, by the contrast, of a more vivid effulgence. The able 
Maury was but an elegant rhetorician ; Cazales, a fluent 
speaker ; Sieyes, a taciturn metaphysician ; Thouret, a 



8 CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY. 

jurist ; Barnave, a hope. But what established his un- 
rivalled dominion over the Assembly was, in the first place, 
the enthusiastical predisposition of the Assembly itself; it 
was the multitude and the concurrence of his astonishing 
faculties, his productive facility, the immensity of his studies 
and his knowledge ; it was the grandeur and breadth of his 
political views, the solidity of his reasoning, the elaborate- 
ness and profundity of his discourses, the vehemence of his 
improvisations, and the pungency of his repartees. 

How different those times from ours ! The whole popu- 
lation of Paris used to mingle breathlessly in the discus- 
sions of the legislature. One hundred thousand citizens 
filled the Tuileries, the Place Vendome, the streets adjacent, 
and copied bulletins were passed from hand to hand, circu- 
lated, thrown among the crowd, containing the occurrences 
of each moment of the debate. There was then some pub- 
lic life and spirit. The nation, the citizens, the Assembly, 
were all in expectation of some great events, all full of that 
electric and vague excitement so favorable to the exhibitions 
of the tribune and the triumphs of eloquence. We, who 
live in an epoch without faith or principles, devoured as we 
are from liead to foot with the leprosy of political material- 
ism — we, Assemblies of manikins who inflate ourselves 
like the mountain in labor, to bring forth but a mouse — we, 
seekers of jobs, of ministerial office, of ribbons, epaulettes, 
collectorships and judgeships — we, a race of brokers and 
stockjobbers, of Haytian or Neapolitan three or five per 
cent — we, men of court, of police, of coteries, of all sorts 
of times, of all sorts of governments, of all sorts of journal- 
ism, of all sorts of opinion — we, deputies of a parish or of a 
fraternity ; deputies of a harbor, of a railroad, of a canal, 
of a vineyard ; deputies of sugar-cane or beet-root ; depu- 
ties of oil or of bitumen ; deputies of charcoal, of salt, of 
ir^Jf", of flax ; deputies of bovine, equine, asinine interests ; 
deputies, in short, of all things except of France, we shall 
never be able to comprehend all that there was in that 
famous Constituent Assembly of deep conviction and 



MIRABEAU. y 

thorough sincerity, of simplicity of heart, of singleness of 
purpose, of virtue, of disinterestedness, and of veritable 
grandeur. 

- No, one would have said there existed then in this As- 
sembly and this nation of our fathers, no men of mature 
years who had experienced the evil days of despotism, none 
of old age who remembered the past. All was generous 
self-sacrifice, patriotic enthusiasm, raptures of liberty, bound- 
less aspirations after a happier future. It was as a beauti- 
ful sun which dissolves the clouds of spring, warms the fro- 
zen limbs, and gilds every object with its pure and genial 
light. The nation, youthful and dreamy, had imaginings of 
distant voices inviting it to the loftiest destinies. It had fits 
of trembling, of tears, of smiles, like a mother in the de- 
livery of her first-born child. It was the Revolution in the 
cradle. 

Our present Chambers are so many little chapels, where 
each one places his own image upon the altar, chants mag- 
nificates, and pays adoration to himself. Our present ora- 
tors are generally but officers without soldiers. They re- 
present but obsolete opinions, decayed and dying parties, 
fractions of fractions, if not of units. They are never 
heard of beyond the range of their voice. They have no 
influence upon the public. 

On the contrary, Mirabeau represented and conducted an 
era. We seem to see him still in the stormy night of the 
past, standing on the mountain, like another Moses, amid 
thunder and lightning, bearing the tables of the law in his 
hands, and his brow encircled Avith a halo of flame, until he 
disappears into the depths of the shade which rises and 
wraps him. 

It is at the voice of Mirabeau that the States- General as- 
semble. It is by the light of his torch they begin their 
march. The Order of the Nobility separate violently and 
revolt. Mirabeau moderates, by his forbearance, the hot- 
headedness of the Tiers-Etat. He flatters, he courts, he 
honors the minority of the Clergy, for the purpose of win- 



10 CONSTITUENT A S B E IM B L Y . 

ning it to his side ; he ascribes to the King his own thoughts, 
to intimidate the Nobles. Then, after he has by little and 
little infused confidence into the timid burgesses (bourgeois) 
of the Commons — at first astonished at the temerity of their 
undertaking — he dazzles them of a sudden with the title 
of Representative of the people. They are no longer a 
fraction of the Assembly — not even the largest — but the 
whole Assembly. The orders of the Clergy and of the No- 
bles are about to fade and be absorbed, like feeble rays in 
the blaze of the national majesty. 

" What ! need I," says he, " demonstrate that the division 
of Orders, that debate and deliberation by Order, would be 
a contrivance truly sublime for the purpose of establishing 
constitutionally selfishness in the priesthood, pride in the 
aristocracy, baseness in the people, confusion among all in- 
terests, corruption in all classes, cupidity in every soul, the 
insignificance of the nation, the impotence of the prince, 
the despotism of the ministry V 

It was not enough for Mirabeau to have, by an able ma- 
noeuvre, separated the forces and sundered the union of the 
two dissenting orders, to have sanctioned the permanence of 
insurrection by the personal inviolability of the insurgents, 
in fine, to have obtained a decreeal of the unity, indivisi- 
bility, and sovereignty of the Constituent Assembly — it was 
further necessary to find for this sovereignty occupation and 
authority. 

The Court, by its insane, arbitrary and prodigal creation 
of imposts, and the Nobles and Clergy, by their refusal to 
contribute, had piled up the' public debt and precipitated the 
ruin of the finances. The evil bore within itself the rem- 
edy, remedy still more of a political than a financial nature, 
remedy which could cure the nation only in as far as it should 
be applied by its own hands. This remedy was the pre- 
vious voting of all taxation by the people. But the Con- 
stituent Assembly represented the people. Therefore, by 
refusing the supplies, it could arrest the government, as 
we dismount the spring of a clock, as the axle-tree is de- 



MIRABEAU. 11 

tached from the whirling chariot. With the refusal of the 
impost proposed by Mirabeau, the Revolution was already 
accomplished. 

Our fathers cast their works in brass, we scrape ours upon 
glass. They wisely looked for resemblances, we foolishly 
amalgamate contraries. They invented, we copy. They 
were architects, we are but masons. Since Mirabeau, we 
have scarce done anything but retrograde in political sci- 
ence ; and if they doubt this, let them read the Declaration 
of the Rights of Man, by Mirabeau. It contained : 

The equality and the liberty of all men by right of birth. 
— The establishment, modification and periodic revision of 
the Constitution by the people ; the Law, the expression of 
the general will ; the delegation of the legislative power to 
representatives frequently renewed, legally and freely elect- 
ed, always existing, annually assembled, and inviolable. 

The infallibility of the King, and the responsibility of 
the ministers. 

The liberty of others, the limit of the liberty of each. 

The liberty of the person, and by way of guarantee, the 
publicity of the charge, the proceedings and the judgment, 
the priority and gradation of penalties. 

The liberty of thought, by speech, writing, or printing, sub- 
ject to the repression of abuse. 

The liberty of worship, subject to the police. 

The liberty of political association, subject to municipal 
surveillance. 

The liberty of locomotion from the interior to other coun- 
tries! 

The liberty of property, commerce, and labor. 

The expropriation of private property for public use, 
providing a just indemnity. 

The previous voting, the proportional equality, the mo- 
rality, justice, and moderation of taxation. 

The establishment of a regular accountability, economy 
in expenditures, moderate salaries, and the abolition of per- 
quisites and sinecures. 



12 CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY. 

The admissibility of every citizen to tlie offices civil, 
ecclesiastical, military. 

The subordination of the military to the civil authorities. 

Resistance to oppression. 

The Declaration of Rights was a magnificent prologue 
to the Constitution, like those porches with which the an- 
cients adorned the temples of their gods. It was a political 
declaration full of grandeur and majesty, a synopsis of the 
doctrines of the philosophers and publicists of the eighteenth 
century, an imitation of the American constitution. The 
French genius loves to generalize, and in the fluctuating 
disorder of opinions, it was necessary to have a rallying 
point, a basis of discussion. The preamble of the Consti- 
tution of 1793, and the charters of 1814 and 1830 are, in 
TlQany respects, but the reproduction, democratized or aris- 
tocratized, of Mirabeau's " Declaration of the Rights of 
Man." 

The speeches of Mirabeau are commonly but the eloquent 
commentary of his Declaration of Rights. He was not 
content, this bold innovator, with discovering new coasts and 
erecting upon them a few landmarks. He built walls and 
cities, and beneath the rubbish and ruins of so many consti- 
tutions which have since crumbled upon one another, we 
find still this day the granite foundations whereupon they 
were raised. 

He sowed profusely in his comprehensive course, all the 
just and sacred maxims of representative government — the 
sovereignty of the people ; the delegation of powers ; the 
veto, the independence, responsibility, and countersignature 
of the ministers; the grand jury; the equality of taxation. 
He advocates the liberty of the press, of religious worship, 
of the individual, of locomotion ; amotion from office ; the 
constitution of municipalities and courts of justice ; the 
establishment of the National Guard and of the Jury ; the 
variability of the civil list, and its reduction to a million 
of income ; exemption from taxes of the necessitous classes ; 
uniformity of the currency and the decimal calculation ; 



M I R A B E A U . 13 

the liberty of peaceful and unarmed associations ; the se- 
crecy of letters ; the frequent and periodic renewal of the 
legislature ; the annual vote of the army estimates ; the 
pecuniary responsibility of the collectors, and the penal re- 
sponsibility of the communes ; the passports to deputies ; 
the sale of national property ; the verification of parliamen- 
tary powers by the Parliament ; the employment of armed 
force at the requisition, and in presence of the municipal 
officers elected by the people ; houses of paternal correc- 
tion ; martial law ; equality of successions ; the legal pre- 
sence, and the right of interrogating the ministers in the 
bosom of the. Assembly ; the denomination of the depart- 
ments ; a civic education. He opposed the peremptory 
mandates, the duality of the Chambers • the immutability 
of the church property ; the initiative direct and personal 
of the King ; the lottery system ; the permanence of tha 
districts. 

One is surprised, recoils affrighted, before the gigantic 
works accomplished by Mirabeau during the two years of 
his parliamentary life. Elaborate discourses, apostrophes, 
replies, motions, addresses, letters to constituents, newspaper 
controversy, reports, morning sessions, evening sessions, 
committee business, he participates in all, superintends all. 
Nothing for him was too great, nothing too little ; nothing too 
complex, and nothing too simple. He bears upon his 
shoulders a world of labors, and seems, in that Herculean 
career, to experience neither fatigue or distaste. He un- 
ravelled with perfect ease the most complicated difficulties, 
and his restless activity exhausted the whole circle of sub- 
jects, without being able to satisfy itself. He kept occupied 
all at the same time his numerous friends, his constituents, 
his agents, his secretaries. He conversed, debated, listened, 
dictated, read, compiled, wrote, declaimed, maintained a cor- 
respondence with all France. He digested the labors of others, 
assimilating them so as that they became his own. He used 
to receive notes as he ascended the tribune, in the tribune 
even, and pass them, without pausing, into the texture of 

2 



14 CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY. 

his discourse. He retouched the harangues and reports 
of which he had given the frame, the plan, the idea. 
He chastened them with his practised judgment, colored 
them with his vivid expressions, strengthened them with his 
vigorous thought. This sublime plagiarist, this grand mas- 
ter, employed his aids and his pupils to extract the marble 
from the quarry and chip off the grosser parts, like the 
statuary who, when the block is rough-hewn, approaches, 
takes his chisel, gives it respiration and life, and makes it a 
hero or a god. 

Mirabeau had a perfect understanding of the mechanism 
and the rights of a deliberative body. He knew how far 
it may go and where it should stop. His disciplinary for- 
mulas have passed into our rules, his maxims into our laws, 
his counsels into our policy. His words were law. He 
presided as he spoke, with a grave dignity, and used to re- 
ply to the several deputations with such fertility of elo- 
quence and felicity of language, that it may be truly said 
the Constituent Assembly has never been better represented 
than by Mirabeau, whether in the chair of the president or 
in the tribune of the orator. What a grand conception he 
formed of the national representation when saying : " Every 
deputation from the people astounds my courage." It was 
with these holy emotions he approached the tribune. 

Mirabeau used to premeditate most of his discourses. — 
His comparison of the Gracchi, his allusion to the Tar- 
peian rock, his apostrophe to Sieyes, his famous speeches 
on the constitution, on the right of war and peace, the royal 
veto, the property of the Clergy, the lottery, the mines, bank- 
ruptcy, the assignats, slavery, national education, the law 
of successions, where he displays such treasures of science 
and profound elaboration of thought — all these are written 
pieces. 

His manner as an orator is that of the great masters of 
antiquity, with an admirable energy of gesture and a vehe- 
mence of diction which perhaps they had never reached. 
He is strong, because he does not diffuse himself; he is 



MIRABEAU. 15 

natural, because he uses no ornaments ; he is eloquent, 
because he is simple ; he does not imitate others, because 
he needs but to be himself; he does not surcharge his dis- 
course with a baggage of epithets, because they would retard 
it ; he does not run into digressions, for fear of wandering 
from the question. His exordiums are sometimes abrupt, 
sometimes majestic, as it comports with the subject. His nar- 
ration of facts is clear. His statement of the question is pre- 
cise and positive. His ample and sonorous phraseology much 
resembles the spoken phraseology of Cicero. He unrolls, 
with a solemn slowness, the folds of his discourse. He 
does not accumulate his enumerations as ornaments, but as 
proofs. He seeks not the harmony of words, but the con- 
catenation of ideas. He does not exhaust a subject to the 
dregs, he takes but the flower. Would he dazzle, the most 
brilliant images spring up beneath his steps ; would he 
touch, he abounds in raptures of emotion, in tender persua- 
sions, in oratorical transports which do not conflict with, but 
sustain, which are never confounded with, but follow, each 
other, which seem to produce one another successively and 
flow with a happy disorder from that fine and prolific 
nature. 

But when he comes to the point in debate, when he enters 
the heart of the question, he is substantial, nervous, logical 
as Demosthenes. He advances in a serried and impenetra- 
ble order. He reviews his proofs, disposes the plan of 
attack, and arrays them in order of battle. Mailed in the 
armor of dialectics, he sounds the charge, rushes upon the 
adversaries, seizes and prostrates them, nor does he loose 
his hold till he compels them, knee on neck, to avow 
themselves vanquished. If they retreat, he pursues, at- 
tacks them front and rear, presses upon them, drives them, 
and brings them inevitably within the imperial circle 
which he had designated for their destruction ; like those 
who, upon the deck of a narrow vessel, captured by board- 
ing her, place a hopeless enemy between their sword and 
the ocean. 



16 CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY. 

IIow liis language must have surprised by its novelty, 
and thrilled the popular heart, when he drew this picture 
of a legal constitution : — 

" Too often are bayonets the only remedy applied to the 
convulsions of oppression and want. But bayonets never 
re-establish but the peace of terror, the silence of despotism. 
Ah ! the people are not a furious herd which must be kept 
in chains ! Always quiet and moderate, when they are 
truly free, they are violent and unruly but under those 
governments where they are systematically debased in 
order to have a pretext to despise them. When we con- 
sider what must result to the happiness of twenty-five 
millions of men, from a legal constitution in place of minis- 
terial caprices, — from the consent of all the wills and the 
co-operation of all the lights of the nation in the improvement, 
of our laws, from the reform of abuses, from the reduction 
of taxes, from economy in the finances, from the mitigation 
of the penal laws, from regularity of procedure in the tri- 
bunals, from the abolition of a multitude of servitudes which 
shackle industry and mqtilate the human faculties, in a 
word, from that grand system of liberty, which, planted on 
the firm basis of freely-elected municipalities, rises gradu- 
ally to the provincial administrations, and receives its com- 
pletion from the annual recurrence of the States- General — 
when we weigh all that must result from the restoration of 
this vast empire, who does not feel that the greatest of crimes, 
the darkest outrage against humanity, would be to offer 
opposition to the rising destiny of our country and thrust 
her back into the depths of the abyss, there to hold her 
oppressed beneath the burthen of all her chains." 

With what accuracy, with what nicety of observation he 
enumerates the difficulties of the civil and military adminis- 
tration of Bailly and Lafayette when he proposes to vote 
them the thanks of the Assembly : — 

" What an administration ! what an epoch, where all is 
to be feared and all to be braved ! when tumult begets 
tumult, when an affray is produced by the very means taken 



MIR AB E AU. 17 

to prevent it : — when moderation is unceasingly necessary, 
and moderation appears pusillanimity, timidity, treason — 
when you are beset with a thousand counsels, and yet must 
take your own — when all persons are to be dreaded, even 
citizens whose intentions are pure, but whom distrust, ex. 
citement, exaggeration, render almost as formidable as con- 
spirators — when one is obliged, even in critical circum- 
stances, to yield up his wisdom, to lead anarchy in order to 
repress it, to assume an employment glorious, it is true, but 
environed with the most harassing alarms — when it is ne- 
cessary besides, in the midst of such and so many difficul- 
ties, to show a serene countenance, to be always calm, to 
enforce order even in the smallest details, to offend no one, 
to heal all jealousies, to serve incessantly and seek to please, 
but without the appearance of being a servant !" 

When M. Neckar, minister of finance, asked the Assem- 
bly for a vote of confidence, Mirabeau, in order to carry it 
by storm, displayed all the irony of his eloquence and all 
the might of his logic ; and when he saw the auditory 
shaken, he hurled against bankruptcy the following fulmi- 
nations : — 

" Oh ! if declarations less solemn did not guarantee our 
respect for the public faith, our horror of the infamous word 
Bankruptcy, I should say to those who familiarize them- 
selves perhaps with the idea of repudiating the public en- 
gagements, through fear of excessive sacrifices, through 
terror of taxation : — ' What, then, is bankruptcy, if it is 
not the crudest, the most iniquitous, the most disastrous of 
imposts ? My friends, listen to me, a word, a single word ! 
" ' Two centuries of depredation and robbery have exca- 
vated the abyss wherein the kingdom is on the verge of being 
engulfed. This frightful gulf it is indispensable to fill 
up. Well, here is a list of the proprietors. Choose from 
among the richest, so as to sacrifice the smallest number 
of the citizens. But choose ! for is it not expedient that a 
small number perish to save the mass of the people ? Come — 
these two thousand notables possess ^j^^herewith to supply 
2* 



18 CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY 

the deficit. Restore order to our finances, peace and pros- 
perity to the kingdonfi. Strike, and innmolate pitilessly these 
melancholy victims, precipitate them into the abyss ; it is 

about to close What, you recoil with horror ! . . 

. . . Inconsistent, pusillanimous men ! And do you not see 
that in decreeing bankruptcy — or, what is more odious still, 
in rendering it inevitable without decreeing — you disgrace 
yourselves with an act a thousand times more criminal ; 
for, in fact, that horrible sacrifice would remove the deficien- 
cy. But do you imagine, that because you refuse to pay, you 
shall cease to owe ? Do you think the thousands, the mil- 
lions of men who will lose in an instant, by the dreadful ex- 
plosion or its revulsions, all that constituted the comfort of 
their lives, and perhaps their sole means of subsistence, will 
leave you in the peaceable enjoyment of your crime ? 
Stoical contemplators of the incalculable woes which this 
catastrophe will scatter over France ; unfeeling egotists, 
who think these convulsions of despair and wretchedness 
will pass away like so many others, and pass the more 
rapidly as they will be the more violent, are you quite sure 
that so many men without bread will leave you tranquilly to 
luxuriate amid the viands which you will have been unwilling 

to curtail in either variety or delicacy ? No, you 

will perish ; and in the universal conflagration, which you 
do not tremble to kindle, the loss of your honor will not save 
you a single one of your detestable luxuries ! Vote, then, 
this extraordinary subsidy, and may it prove sufficient ! 
Vote it, because the class most interested in the sacrifice 
which the government demands, is you yourselves ! Vote 
it, because the public exigencies allow of no evasion, and 
that you will be responsible for every delay ! Beware of 
asking time; misfortune never grants it. What! gentlemen, 
in reference to a ridiculous movement of the Palais-Royal, 
a ludicrous insurrection which had never any consequence 
except in the weak imaginations or the wicked purposes of a 
few designing men, you have heard not long since these in- 
sane cries : Cataline is at the gates of Rome, and you de- 



MIRABEAU. 19 

liberate / And assuredly, there was around 3'ou neithei* 

Cataline, nor danger, nor factions, nor Rome But 

to-day, bankruptcy, hideous bankruptcy, is there before you. 
It threatens to consume you, your country, your property, 
your honor ! And you deliberate !' " 

This is as beautiful as it is antique. 

Mirabeau in his premeditated discourses was admirable. 
But what was he not in his extemporaneous effusions ? His 
natural vehemence, of which he repressed the flights in his 
prepared speeches, broke down all barriers in his improvi- 
sations. A sort of nervous irritability gave then to his 
whole frame an almost preternatural animation and life. 
His breast dilated with an impetuous breathing. His lion 
face became wrinkled and contorted. His eyes shot forth 
flame. He roared, he stamped, he shook the fierce mass of 
his hair, all whitened with foam ; he trod the tribune with 
the supreme authority of a master, and the imperial air of a 
king. What an interesting spectacle to behold him, mo- 
mently, erect and exalt himself under the pressure of obsta- 
cle ! To see him display the pride of his commanding brow ! 
To see him, like the ancient orator, when, with all the pow- 
ers of his unchained eloquence, he was wont to sway to and 
fro in the Forum the agitated waves of the Roman multitude ! 
Then would lie throw by the measured notes of his decla- 
mation, habitually grave and solemn. Then would escape 
him broken exclamations, tones of thunder, and accents of 
heart-rending and terrible pathos. He concealed with the 
flesh and color of his rhetoric the sinewy arguments of his 
dialectics. He transported the Assembly, because he was 
himself transported. And yet — so extraordinary was his 
force — he abandoned himself to the torrent of his eloquence, 
without wandering from his course ; he mastered others by 
its sovereign sway, without losing for an instant his own 
self-control. 

His improvisations, whether from rapid exhaustion, or 
rather instinct of his art, were brief. He knew that strong 
emotions lose their eflect by duration — that it is unwise to- 



20 CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY. 

leave the enthusiasm of friends the time to cool, or the ob- 
jections of adversaries time for preparation — that people soon 
come to laugh at the thunder which rumbles in the air with- 
out producing a bolt, and that an antagonist should be struck 
down promptly, like the cannon ball which kills at a blow. 

It was contended the Assembly ought not to have the ini- 
tiative in the impeachment of the ministers. Mirabeau re- 
plied on the spot : 

" You forget that the people to whom you oppose the lim- 
itation of the three powers, is the source of all the powers, 
and that it alone can delegate them ! You forget that it is 
to the sovereign you would deny the control of his own ad- 
ministrators ! You forget, in short, that we, the representa- 
tives of the sovereign, — in presence of whom stand suspended 
all the powers of the State, those even of the chief of the 
nation in case of confliction, — you forget that we by no means 
pretend to place or displace ministers by virtue of our de- 
crees, but solely to manifest the opinion of our constituents 
respecting such or such a minister ! What ! you would re- 
fuse us the simple right of declaration — you who accord us 
that of accusing, of prosecuting, and of creating a tribunal to 
punish these fabrications of iniquity, the machinations of 
which, by a palpable contradiction, you would have us to con- 
template in a respectful silence ! Do you not see then how 
much a better lot I would ensure our governors than you, 
how much I exceed you in moderation ? You allow no in- 
terval between a boding silence and a sanguinary denunci- 
ation. To say nothing or to punish, to obey or to strike — 
such is your system ! And for me, I would notify before 
denouncing, I would remonstrate before casting reproach !" 

He frequently used, by inspiration, those vivid figures 
which transport of a sudden, men, objects, and places on the 
stage, and make them hear, speak, and act, as if they were 
really present. The Assembly was about to plunge im- 
prudently into religious quarrels. Mirabeau, to cut the mat- 
ter short, rose and said : " Recollect that from this place, from 
the very tribune where I now speak, I can see the window 



MIRABEAU. 21 

of the palace through which factious miscreants, uniting 
temporal interests with the most sacred interests of religion, 
had fired by the hand of a king of the French the fatal gun 
which was to be the signal of the massacre of the Huguenots !" 

A deputation of the Assembly was preparing to wait 
upon the King to request the dismission of the troops, al- 
ready three times refused. The indignant Mirabeau, un- 
able to contain himself, addresses the Committee : — 

" Say to the King — say to him, that the hordes of foreign- 
ers by whom we are invested, have received yesterday the 
visit of the princes, of the princesses, of the favorites, male 
and female, also their caresses, and their exhortations, and 
their presents ! Say to him that the whole night, these for- 
eign satellites, gorged with gold and wine, have been pre- 
dicting in their impious songs the enslavement of France, 
and invoking with their brutal vows the destruction of the 
National Assembly ! Say to him that in his very palace, 
the courtiers have led their dances to the sound of this bar- 
barous music, and that such was the prelude of the Saint- 
Bartholomew !" 

In his fine discourse on the " right of peace and war," 
Mirabeau had arrived after some confusion of ideas, at a 
precise solution of the difficulty, by means of ministerial 
responsibility, and the refusal of the supplies on the part of 
the legislative power. But as soon as he had uttered these 
closing words : " Fear not that a rebel King, abdicating of 
himself his sceptre, will expose himself to the peril of run- 
ning from victory to the scaffold," he was interrupted with 
violent murmurs. D'Espremenil moved that he be called 
to order, for having attacked the inviolability of the King ! 
" You have all," replied Mirabeau at the instant, " heard 
my supposition of a despotic and revolted King, who 
should come, with an army of Frenchmen, to conquer the 
position of tyrants. But a King in this position, is no longer 
a King." — General applause : — Mirabeau proceeds : " It is 
the tocsin of necessity alone which can give the signal, 
when the moment is come for fulfilling the imprescriptable 



22 CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY. 

duty of resistance — a duty always imperative whenever the 
Constitution is violated, always triumphant when the resist- 
ance is just and truly national." 

Are not these words the prophetic and living picture of 
the Revolution of July. 

In the same effusion and a little after, Mirabeau, in a 
celebrated adjuration, introduces on the stage the Abbe 
Sieyes. — " I will not conceal," said he, " my deep regret 
that the man who has laid the foundations of the Constitution, 
that the man who has revealed to the world the true princi- 
ples of representative government, who condemns himself 
to a silence which I deplore, which I think culpable, that" 
the Abbe Sieyes — I ask his pardon for naming him — 
does not come forward to insert, himself, in his constitution, 
one of the most important springs of the social order. This 
occasions me the more pain, that crushed beneath a weight 
of labor beyond my intellectual forces, unceasingly hurried 
off from self-collection and meditation, which are the prin- 
cipal sources of mental power, I had not myself turned at- 
tention to this question of the completion of my work, ac- 
customed as I was to repose upon that great thinker. 1 
have pressed him, conjured, implored in the name of the 
friendship with which he honors 'me, in the name of Patri- 
otism — that sentiment far more energetic and holy — to en- 
dow us with the treasure of his ideas, not to leave a blank 
in the Constitution. He has refused me, I denounce him to 
you ! I conjure you, in my turn, to obtain his opinion which 
ought not to be a secret, to rescue in fine from discourage- 
ment a man whose silence and seclusion I regard as a pub- 
lic calamity." 

I have remarked that what has raised Mirabeau incom- 
parably beyond other orators, is the profundity and breadth 
of his thoughts, the solidity of his reasoning, the vehemence 
of his improvisations ; but it is especially the unexampled 
felicity of his repartees. In fact, the auditors and princi- 
pally the rival orators hold themselves on their guard against 
premeditated speeches. As they know that the orator has 



MIRABEAU. 93 

spread in advance his toils to surprise them, they prepare ac- 
cordingly in advance to elude him. They search for, ihey di- 
vine, they discover, they dispose for themselves, with more or 
less of ability, the arguments which he must employ, his 
facts, his proofs, his insinuations, and sometimes even his fig- 
ures and happiest movements. They have thus, all ready to 
meet him, their objections. They shut the air-and-eye holes 
of their helmet, they cover the weak points of their cui- 
rass where his lance might penetrate ; and when the orator 
crosses the barrier, and rushes impetuous to the conflict, he 
encounters before him an enemy armed cap-a-pie, who bars 
his way and disputes valiantly the victory. — But a happy 
oratorical retort astonishes and delights even your adversa- 
ries ; it produces the effect of things unexpected. It is a 
startling counterplot, which cuts the gordian knots of the 
play and precipitates the catastrophe. It is the lightning 
flash amid the darkness of night. It is the arm which 
strikes in the buckler of the enemy, who draws it instantly 
and returns it to pierce the bosom of him. who had launched 
it. — The repartee shakes the irresolute and floating masses 
of an assembly. It comes upon you, as the eagle, concealed 
in the hollow of a rock, makes a stoop at its prey and car- 
ries it oflfall palpitating in its talons, before it even has emitted 
a cry. It arouses, by the stimulant of its novelty, the thick- 
skulled, phlegmatic, and drowsy deputies who were falling 
asleep. It sends a sudden and softening thrill to the soul. 
It fires the audience to cry. To arms ! to arms ! It wrino-s 
from the bosom exclamations of wrath. It provokes laugh- 
ter inextinguishable. It compels the adversary — oflicer or 
soldier — to go hide his shame in the ranks of his company, 
who open them to receive him but with pity and derision. 
It resolves with a word the question in a debate. It signifies 
an event. It reveals a characte-r. It paints a situation. It 
absolves, it condemns, a party. It makes a reputation, or it 
unmakes it. It glorifies, it stigmatizes, it dejects, it cheers, 
it unbinds, it reattaches, it saves, it slays. It attracts, it 
suspends magically, as by a golden chain, an entire assem- 



24 CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY. 

bly from the lips of a single man. It concentrates at the 
same time its whole attention upon a single point, for a mo- 
ment produces unanimity, and may decide of a sudden the 
loss or the gain of a parliamentary battle. 

Never did Mirabeau shrink from an objection or an ad- 
versary. He drew himself up to his full height under the 
menace of his enemies, and burst by sledge-blows the nail 
which it was intended he should draw. — In the tribune he 
braved the prejudices, the dumb objurgations and muttering 
impatience of the Assembly. Immovable as a rock, he 
crossed his arms and awaited silence. — He retorted instantly, 
blow after blow, upon all opponents and on all subjects, with 
a rapidity of action and a nicety of pertinence really sur- 
prising. He painted men and things with a manner and 
words entirely his own. — How energetically did he describe 
France, " an unconstituted aggregation of disunited people." 
— He used to say in his monarchical language : " The mon- 
arch is the perpetual representative of the people, and the 
deputies are the temporary representatives." — Member of 
the directory of Paris, he expressed himself thus before the 
King : " A tall tree covers with its shade a large surface. 
Its roots shoot wide and deep through the soil and entwine 
themselves around eternal rocks. To pull it down the earth 
itself must be uptorn. Such, Sire, is the image of constitu- 
tional monarchy." — Assailed impertinently by M. de Fau- 
cigny, he words the reprimand in these terms : " The As- 
sembly, satisfied with the repentance you testify, remits you, 
sir, the penalty which you have incurred." 

What vivacity, what actuality, what nobleness in all these 
repartees ! what keen and chivalrous irony ! what vigor ! 

The pretensions of the republic of Genoa to the island of 
Corsica were occupying the deliberation of the house at un- 
necessary length. 

Mirabeau : — " I do not think that a league between Ra- 
gusa, Lucca, Saint-Maro, and some other powers equally 
formidable, ought to give you great inquietude ; nor do I re- 
gard as very dangerous the republic of Genoa, whose armies 



MIR ABE AU. 25 

have been put to flight by twelve men and twelve women on 
the sea-coast in Corsica. I move an extremely indefinite ad- 
journment." 

Cazalos proposed, as a remedy for the public evils, the 
investment of the King during three months with unlimited 
executive power. — Mirabeau said : " M. de Cazales is be- 
side the question, for he discusses whether or not the King 
is to be accorded a dictatorship." — And as the Abbe Maury 
insisted upon the right of Cazales to make this motion, Mi- 
rabeau replied : " I have pretended not that the preceding 
speaker had transgressed his right; I have said only that he 
was beside the question. He has demanded the dictatorship ; 
the dictatorship over a nation of twenty-five millions of souls ! 
The dictatorship to one man ! in a country actually occupied 
in forming its Constitution, in a country whose representatives 
are assembled in council, the dictatorship to a single indi- 
vidual !" 

To the optimists who slumbered in presence of the men- 
acing state of affairs : — " We sleep ; but do not people sleep 
at the foot of Vesuvius ?" 

To the Abbe Maury, who taunted him with invoking the 
aid of the populace : — " I will not stoop to repel the charge 
just made upon me, unless the Assembly dignify it to my 
level, by ordering me to reply. In that case, I would deem 
it sufficient for my vindication and my glory to name my ac- 
cuser and to name myself.'''' 

To a verbal dispute respecting the wording of a clause in 
the Constitution : — " I will observe that it would not be amiss 
that the National Assembly of France should speak French, 
and even indite in French the laws which it proposes." 
* To those who claimed the inalienability of the ancient 
foundations of the Clergy : — " If all the men who have lived 
upon the earth had each had a separate tomb, it would have 
been indispensable, in order to find lands for cultivation, to 
pull down these monuments, and to plough the ashes of the 
dead for the sustenance of the living." 

To a deputy wlio moved the adjournment of a motion 



26 CON S T I T U E N T ASSEMBLY 



relative to som3 unfortunates under capital sentence : — 
" Were you going to be Iiung, sir, would you propose the 
adjournment of an investigation which might result in saving 
your life ?" 

To those who j)retended that the demand upon the king to 
dismiss the ministry must prove the ruin of England : — 
*' England is lost ! Ah ! great God ! what unfortunate 
news ! But in what latitude has she been lost, or what 
earthquake, what convulsion of nature has engulfed that 
famous island, that inexhaustible abode of great examples, 
that classic land of the friends of freedom ? . . . . But you give 
us heart, you give us hope .... England is repairing, in a 
glorious silence, the wounds she inflicted upon herself in the 
delirium of a burninoj fever. Eno-land flourishes still for 
the eternal instruction of the world !" 

To another who grew indignant at the proposition of a 
single Chamber : — " I have al\va3^s dreaded to provoke rea- 
son, but never individuals." 

To the address of the town of Rennes, declaring as trai- 
tors and enemies of the country, the supporters of the 
Royal Veto : — " If the Assembly bestow much time upon 
such a subject, it will have the air of a giant who stands 
on tip-toe in order to appear tall. Melun, Chaillot, Vira- 
flay, have the right of uttering the same absurdities as 
Rennes : like Rennes they qualify as scoundrels and traitors 
to the country, those who do not share their opinions. The 
national Assembly has not time to institute itself professor 
to the municipalities that may advance false maxims." 

To the Committee upon the constitution who opposed a 
motion of amendment : — " The Committees are beyond all 
doubt the elect of the universe. But the national Assembly 
has not yet said that it meant to decree them the exclusive 
privilege of investigating and debating the subjects of its 
deliberations." 

To a member who would preserve in the royal proclama- 
tions these words : To all present and future, greeting f 
Miraboau remarked : " If the mode of salutation should 



MTRABEAU. 27 

pass away !" And to another who wished the expressions : 
King of France and Navarre : " Would it not be proper to 
add : And other }}laces /" 

To a member who maintained that the deputies ought to 
•enjoy the privilege of inviolability accorded to ambassadors, 
since they too were representatives of nations : — " I will 
reply that I was not aware there had been in this Assembly 
ambassadors from Dourdan, ambassadors from the land of 
Gex. I prefer to think that we are here but the represen- 
tatives of the French nation, and not of the nations of 
France." 

To those who disapproved the title of French people : — " I 
adopt it, I defend it, I proclaim it, for the very reason which 
makes it obnoxious. Yes, it is because the name of people 
is not sufficiently respected in France — because it is ob- 
scured, covered with the rust of prejudice — because it pre- 
sents us an idea at which pride takes alarm and vanity 
revolts — because it is mentioned with contempt in the draw- 
ing-rooms of the aristocrats — It is for this very reason, gentle- 
men, that I would wish, — it is for this very reason that wq 
ought to make it a duty, not only to elevate it, but to ennoble 
it and render it henceforth respectable to ministers and deai 
to every heart." 

To a pamphlet against him, distributed on the benches, 
and of which he read only the title as he mounted the 
tribune : — " I know enough of it, tind I will be borne from 
this place triumphant or a corpse." 

To a libel of Marat, wherein he was called a designing 
knave and a scoundrel fit for the gallows : — " This pamphlet 
of a drunken man speaks of designing knaves. Well, it is 
not the Chatelet of Paris, but the mad-house of Senegal, that 
befits this extravagance. I alone am named in it. Pass 
to the order of the day." 

To an informer reading a letter found upon a pretended 
agent of Mirabeau, and where it was said : Riquetti the elder 
is a scoundrel : — " Mr. Informer, do you not flatter me ? 
you have had the goodness to furnish me a copy, and I 



28 GONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY. 

think I read : Riquetti the elder is an infamous scoundrel. 
It is well to exhibit in its true colors the faithful portrait 
which my agent has drawn of me. Read all." 

And on another occasion : — " I have seen fifty-four 
lettres -de-cachet in my family. Yes, gentlemen, fifty- four, 
and I have had seventeen for my part. So, you see, I have 
had my share as elder brother of Normandy." 

To those who interrupted his exclamations against a law 
of vengeance : — " The popularity which I have aspired to 
and which I have enjoyed, is not a feeble reed. It is deep in 
the earth that I mean to infix its roots, upon the enduring 
basis of reason and liberty. If you make this law, I swear 
never to obey it." 

To those who denied the Assembly the legitimate powers of 
a national Convention : — " Our national Convention is above 
all imitation, as above all authority ; it is accountable but 
to itself, and can be judged but by posterity. Gentlemen, 
you all remember the remark of that Roman, who, to save 
his country from a dreadful conspiracy, had overstepped the 
powers conferred on him by the laws : — Swear, said a cap- 
tious demagogue of that day, that you have observed the 
laws. — I swear, replied this great man, that I have saved 
the republic ! — Gentlemen, I swear that you have saved 
the commonwealth." 

Both the opposite parties accused him at the same time of 
conspiracy : — " One moment a factious conspirator," replied 
he, " the next a counter-revolutionary conspirator ! permit 
me, gentlemen, to ask a division." 

Mirabeau was obstinate in defending the royal veto ; in- 
stantly the wind of his popularity changed. He is de- 
nounced in an infamous libel, which accused him of high 
treason : — " And me, too," he exclaimed, in an oratorical 
movement which electrified the Assembly, " and me, too, 
they would, some days since, have borne in triumph, and 
now they cry through the streets :—The great conspiracy of 
Count Miraleau. I needed not this lesson to know that there 
is but a step from the Capitol to the Tarpeian rock." 



M 1 R A B E A U . • 29 

^ In fine, what is there in the history of ancient eloquence 
more spirited, more haughty, more heroic, more insolent, more 
unexpected, more victorious, more stunning, more over- 
whelming, more crushing, than the repartee of Mirabeau to 
the grand masterof ceremonies of the Court ? — " The Com- 
mons of France liave resolved to deliberate : and you, sir, who 
could not be tiie organ of the king to the national Assembly ; 
you, who have here neither seat, nor vote, nor right of speak- 
ing, go tell your master that we are here by the will of the 
people, and that we will not be torn from it save by the force 
of bayonets." 

M. de Baize, as if thunderstruck, walked backwards in. 
leaving the hall. It was the Monarchy retreating before the 
Revolution. 

I will not descend into the private life of Mirabeau, which 
has been to him rather an obstacle than an aid, a blemish 
than a foil. I am not a retailer of anecdotes, nor a biof- 
rapher of scandals. I am a painter, and have to represent, 
in each of my personages, but the politician, and especially 
the orator. 

For the rest, public opinion treats with less severity the 
men of the Opposition, such as Mirabeau, Sheridan, and 
others of our day, for they were but orators. It is more 
severe towards the men in authority, and justly so, for they 
owe example, they govern. What has been said of Maxaaifi ? 
He is a profligate. What used to be said of Turgot ? He 
is a conscientious minister. And of Robespierre ? He is 
incorruptible. And of Louis XVI. ? He is an honest man. 
The people must esteem those who govern them. The sen- 
timent does honor to the morality of the human species. 

Mirabeau has often regretted the debaucheries of imagina- 
tion and of temperament which deflowered his youth. He 
has nobly repaired them in avowing them, even in the 
tribune. He bore his heart as high as his head. 

Add that his discourses, motions, addresses, amendments, 
breathe, in his public capacity, the purest morality. — He 

3* 



30 CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY. 

used to say : " ft is more important to give men morals and 
habits than laws and tribunals." 

Singular circumstance ! it was he who, through a reli- 
gious sentiment, caused to be retained the title : Louis, hy 
the grace of God, King of the French. 

Just escaped from the dungeons of Vincennes, he loved 
liberty fanatically, idolatrously. For the rights and the 
wants of the people he had a profound, elevated, and delicate 
respect. He was of opinion that there ought to be estab- 
lished in society such an order of things that, every where, 
the aged would have a place of refuge, and the poor, em- 
ployment and food. 

More vicious in temperament than in heart — extreme in 
hiis passions, haughty in his repentance — impatient of all 
restraint — careless about the morrow, like all men of letters 
— forgetful of injuries, like all great souls — poor, harassed by 
lov/ wants, pining for glory, proud of his birth, and playing 
at the same time the noble and the tribune — insinuating to 
the fascination of even his enemies ; his soul was an inex- 
haustible furnace of sensibility, whence issued those sudden 
illuminations of his eloquence. ^ Impetuous, daring, natural, 
cheerful, humane, generous to excess ; expansive, open- 
hearted, even to familiarity, and familiar to indiscretion ; — 
prompt and powerful in intellect, sparkling with imagination 
and wit, with an immenseness of memory, taste, talent, and 
knov/Iedge, and a prodigious facility of composition, — such 
v/as Mirabeau. 

Mirabeau had long meditated upon the art of military 
strategy. Brave himself and born of heroic blood, his iron 
constitution, his comprehensive glance, his vast faculties, his 
presence of mind and unshaken firmness amid danger, would 
have raised him at once to the first honors of war. He 
would have been as good a general as he was an orator. 

A man almost complete and the only one of his sort, Mira- 
beau was the greatest orator and the greatest politician of 
his time. He would have made its greatest minister also ; 
for he had the genius of business, the unity and certitude 



f^ 



M I R A B E A U . 31 



which result from system, patience for details, knowledge 
of men, foresight into the future, fertility of expedients, af- 
fability of manners, energy of will, the instinct of com- 
mand, the confidence of the country, and a universal re- 
nown. 

Mirab^au and Napoleon have both — each in reference to 
the time wherein he appeared and the special nature of his 
labors — contributed the most to organize modern France ; 
for the one constituted the Revolution, the other the Em- 
pire. Mirabeau in fine was the man of those times to whom 
it would have been given, had he lived, the most to destroy 
and the most to re-edify ; equally fit for both these courses, 
by the power of his genius and the perseverance of his will. 
Not that he wished to re-erect what he had demolished. He 
knew well that new edifices are not to be rebuilt with the 
ruins of the old. " A gangrened body," he used to say, 
" is not to be healed by applying sore to sore, ulcer to ulcer. 
There must be a transfusion of new blood." But with this 
new blood, it is not the renovation of the old man, it is the 
creation of a new man, it is another. 

Despite of this, he indulged the dream of the alliance 
since so much and so vainly sought, of liberty with mon- 
archy. He desired this monarchy with all its conditions of 
strength and durability, and by a strange inconsequence, his 

maxims were republican and his measures revolutionary.- 

Whether it was that he did not perceive this contradiction, 
or that he flattered himself with being able to surmount it, 
he designed and attempted the amalgamation, the fusion, the 
chimera, both in Parliament and out of it. He urged, in the 

Constituent Assembly, after his picturesque manner : " We 

are not savages come stark naked from the banks of the 
Oronoko, to form a society. We are an old nation — too old. 
We have a pre-existing government, a pre-existing king, pre- 
existing prejudices. We must therefore, as far as possible, 
assort all these things to the Revolution, and parry the ab- 
ruptness of the transition." 

He tried to repair, by means of his veto, the founderino* 



32 O O N S T 1 T U E N 'r ASSEMBLY. 

vessel of royalty. He did not see that with the reality of 
the veto power, under a hereditary king, the sovereignty of 
the people is but a name and a shadow, and that with the 
fiction of the veto under a popular constitution, the sove- 
reignty of the monarch is in like manner but a name and 
a dream. The reason is, that, necessarily, the sovereignty 
must reside somewhere, and being, in its nature, one and 
indivisible, it cannot repose at the same time upon two dif- 
ferent heads. We must then choose. • For the co-existence 
of two wills equal and independent is not a state of har- 
mony but of hostility ; and hostility is conflict, and conflict is 
the death of one of the combatants. 

The absolute veto of the prince implies that the prince 
governs. For it is to govern to the fullest extent, to do what 
one wishes and not to do what he does not wish. The sus- 
pensive veto of the prince implies that the prince reigns, but 
does not govern. For it is npt to govern when one is, ulti- 
mately, obliged to do that which he does not wish. The 
veto of the prince is, in a parliamentary monarchy, but the 
veto of the ministry. But, responsible ministers are the 
servants of the parliament ; from it they are taken, to it they 
return, by it they execute, for it they govern. How should 
not they and their successors come at last to yield to it ? 

This whole thesis is reduced at the present day to a few 
points, very precise, and which are these : The refusal to tax 
effectually places all the power in the hands of the refuser. 
The suspensive veto is, if you will, equivalent to a second 
Chamber, and nothing more. The dissolution of the Legisla- 
tive body is the appeal of the ministry to the people. The 
counter-force of a persisting veto is a revolution. This is, 
in our day, the position of things. 

Mirabeau had some presentiments of this species of mon- 
archy, whether by political prescience or an inspiration of 
his ambition. Without doubt, the enviers of his fame de- 
sired to preclude him from the ministry. But independ- 
ently of this particular cause, the Constituent Assembly, by 
the necessity, by the law of its position, by the instinctive 



Ml K A B E A U . 33 

destiny of its object, by the irresistible logic of its princi- 
ples, by the blind opposition of the courtiers, must desire 
for itself and for it alone, permanence, unity and omnipo- 
tence. The providential reason of a revolution is not the 
same as the reason of a normal state of society. 

Mirabeau, defeated on the Veto question by the Assembly's 
distrust of the royal authority, returned to the charge on the 
question of the admission of Ministers to a seat ; but in spite 
of the unheard-of efforts of intellect, eloquence, and logic, 
he succumbed beneath the violence of the same prejudice. 
He then determined to seek, outside of the Parliament, for 
support and forces against it. But why — and here returns 
that embarrassing question — why did Mirabeau stop all of a 
sudden on the declivity of the revolution ? Was he affrighted 
himself by the noise and violence of its course ? Did he 
mean only to save liberty from its own aberrations, by pass- 
ing into its mouth a curb and bridle ? His prejudices of 
education, of family, of birth, did they resieze him uncon- 
sciously ? Was he bought over by the Court ? Did he de- 
sire a limited monarchy, purged of federalism and favoritism, 
a king and two Chambers, a constitutional trinity? Or 
rather, weary, cloyed with the emotions of the orator, this 
man of boundless passions, did he wish to taste the different 
emqtions offered by the ministerial office ? Had he the am- 
bition, under the guise of a powerless and merely nominal 
royalty, to govern the Assembly and France ? Posterity 
alone will furnish — or, perhaps, will not be able to furnish — 
the solution of this problem, to us insoluble. 

What is less doubtful is, that Mirabeau meant to push his 
colleagues to excesses, perhaps to crimes, in. order to punish 
them afterwards for having committed them. A mode of 
perdition quite satanic and worthy of Machiavel ; a political 
immorality which honest men cannot brand with too much 
indignation, and which leaves a dark, a very dark stain 
upon the glory of this great man. 

Mirabeau, with his back like another Hercules opposed 
to the breaches of the revolutionary torrent, strove to check 



34 CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY. 

the consequences which, at all points, broke out impetu- 
ously from their principle. He had in his star the faith 
somewhfrt superstitious of great men. He imagined that 
the flying arrow may stop short in the jair before reaching 
its object. He wished himself to serve alone intrepidly for 
object to the continual firing of his enemies. He was already 
preparing, with a paroxysm of energy, to renew the giant 
struggle, when all of a sudden, his strength gave way, and 
he sunk like the monarchy of which he wore the mourning.* 
At this astounding intelligence, Paris is agitated, the peo- 
ple run to his residence, and gather around, with lamenta- 
tions and tears, the couch of Mirabeau dying, of Mirabeau 
dead. They contemplate with pensive eye the corpse of 
their tribune. They touch it, they seek still there some 
remnant of vital heat ; they ask, in the wildness of their 
despair, that their veins be opened, and that, to revive his 
vitality, he be given a part of theirs ; they press and chafe 
those icy hands which hurled so often the popular thunder- 
bolts. They harness themselves to his hearse and draw his 

* As soon as it was known that Mirabeau was in clanger of death, 
the legislature adjourned, the festivals ceased, the streets were filled 
with people, Paris was one scene of consternation. Some of the 
populace entreated to have their veins opened to perform operations 
of transfusion with their blood upon Mirabeau ; others wrung their 
hands with despair, such was the wild enthusiasm of the public 
mind ! 

For him, taken suddenly as if with an unknown malady, he viewed 
the approaching death with great severity. " What epitaph," said 
he, " is to be inscribed upon my tomb ?" 

The Constituent Assembly, followed by an immense multitude, 
bore triumphantly his body to the Pantheon, by the light of a thou- 
sand, torches. Subsequently, a decree of 1793 ordained that the 
statue of Mirabeau be veiled until his memory should be reestab- 
lished. There, one night, two Police waiters threw the body into a 
sack and proceeded to bury it in the cemetery of Clamart, which is 
at present the burial ground only for persons who have been execu- 
ted, among whom the undistinguishable remains of this great orator 
lie mixed and confounded. 



M I R A B E A U . 35 



remains to the Pantheon, with the pomp and the apotheosis 

of a king.* 

Alas ! no more was to be heard that voice of the tri- 
bune, of which the reverberation rolled, like successive 
thunder-claps, from column to column, along the magnifi- 
cent aisles of the Revolution ; that voice of the states- 
man which proclaimed the principles of the French Consti- 
tution ; that voice of the orator which, in early antiquity, 
would' have stirred up by its inconceivable influence, the 
nations, the cities, and the kingdoms. O vicissitudes of 
popularity ! Those statues which had been erected ni honor 
of him, were, in the name of patriotism, to be hung with 
crape, as they cover with a black veil the face of the parri- 
cide ! And that enthusiastic and fickle multitude, who would 
have their blood drawn to transfuse it into the exhausted 
veins of Mirabeau, and who had carried him between their 
triumphant arms beneath the dome of the Pantheon, were, 
by and by, to execrate their tribune and to stone his memory ! 
And this Pantheon, to which his ever-glorious ashes had 

* In the memoirs of Samuel Romilly, a Parisian correspondent, 

■writing to him, says :— -, x <- 

"Mirabeau's career could not have come to an end at a moment 
more propitious for his own fame ; six months earlier his death would 
have been considered as a happy event for the public; and only two 
months ago, it woiild have been looked upon with general indiffer- 
ence But, fbr some weeks past, he had so entirely taken up the 
right side, and it was so strongly felt that he could not but accom- 
plish what he wished, that all well-disposed people had placed in him 
their hopes for the restoration of order and peace, and looked upon 
him as the terror of the factions, and the prop of the Constitution." 

Dumont, also, who was Mirabeau's intimate friend, writes to Rom- 
illy:— 

" So, Mirabeau is extinguished in the midst of his career ! Is it p, 
misfortune for the Revolution ? I think it is. His house was a focus 
of liberty. If he did not work himself, he made others work : he 
stimulated men of talent, and was a strong prop to the party whose 
cause he espoused. He was dangerous, no doubt, from his passions, 
which exerted absolute dominion over him ; but even these might be 
directed to good ends, and he had a love of glory. I felt, from the 
grief that I eiperienced at his loss, that he had acquired a stronger 



36 CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY. 

been committed for eternity, under the guardianship of a 
grateful nation, was to spue them from its bosom as a mass 
of contamination and horror ! — And he, he who, on the edge 
of his burning couch, raved about glory and prosperity, and 
who asked all his weeping friends around him for epitaphs 
for his tomb, how would he not have shuddered had he 
known that his remains were to be disentombed in the secrecy 
of night, and carried, by the lurid torch-light, to be thrown 
into the vulgar ditch appropriated to criminals ? Where are 
now those magnificent epitaphs which he had promised him- 
self? Where is to be found and how to be recognized the 
head of that great Riquetti amid those heaps of gory trunks 
and skulls all mutilated by the axe of the executioner ! O 
vanity of our aspirations ! O nothingness of human great- 



hold on my affections tlian I had been myself aware of. It was impos- 
sible to know him, and not be fascinated by his talents and his en- 
gaging manners. How often have I lamented that his powers should 
have wanted the influence of an unsullied reputation ! His passions 
have consumed him ; if he had known how to control them, he might 
have lived for a hundred years.— Our aristocrats tore him to pieces, 
and they regret him ; the death of a man who sustained public credit 
is a real loss to them." 



^ , L.- 






'^f^X 








© A K! TT © 




THE CONVENTION 



D ANTON. 

The Convention opened under the gloomy auspices of 
death, having the guillotine at its side, and the Revolutionary- 
tribunal in the prospect. 

The members of the Constituent Assembly had been men 
of theory; those of the Convention were men of action. 

The Mountain and the Gironde advanced against each 
other like hostile armies on a field, of battle, surveying 
each other's strength, and mutually exchanging unmeasured 
defiances, while the Plain, tossed to and fro by conflicting 
winds, bore, like a drifting body, now towards one side, now 
to the other, and gave itself up to the currents of its fear. 

It seemed as if a sword, suspended by some invisible 
thread, depended over the head of the president, of each 
speaker, of each deputy. Paleness sat upon every coun- 
tenance ; vengeance boiled in every bosom. The imagi- 
nation was filled with corpses and funeral processions; a 
death shudder ran through every discourse. The sole topics 
of the broken, convulsive, and as if involuntarily uttered 
speeches, were crimes, conspiracies, treasons, complicities, 
scaffolds. 

Marat was seen to draw from his bosom a pistol, and resting 
it upon his forehead : " Another word," he exclaimed, " and 
I blow out my brains." Not one around him fell back, or 
took the slightest alarm. So much to kill one's self, or to be 
killed, appeared at that time natural ! 

4 



38 THE CONVENTION. 

David, mounting his seat, vociferated: "1 demand that 
you assassinate me !" 

Men rushed to the tribune, with eye on fire, the fist 
clenched, the breast palpitating, to incriminate, or to defend 
themselves. In testimony of tlieir innocence they staked 
their head. They demanded that of others. For all 
crimes, without distinction, no other penalty was invoked 
than death. The Assembly wanted but the executioner — 
who was not far ofT. 

Victory seemed a moment to declare for the Gironde. 
Then it is impossible to form an idea of the vehemence of 
insult, contempt, gesture, and look which assailed Marat. 
His person was shrunk from with horror, as if he had no- 
thing of humanity, neither shape, nor speech, nor even the 
name. 

As Robespierre ascended the tribune, cries were raised 
of " Down with the Dictator !" Robespierre winced, but 
quickly retrieved himself, and day by day he went on 
gathering that leaden cloud which was soon to burst in the 
death of Louis XVI. — the punishment of the Girondists — 
the insurrection of La Vendee — the establishment of the re- 
volutionary tribunal — the permanence of the guillotine — the 
demagoguism of the clubs — the carnage of the prisons — 
the denunciations — the reign of terror. 

Vergniaud guillotined, Danton guillotined, the Conven- 
tion fell into deep gloom and a sort of stupor. To the crisis 
and the fever had succeeded the chill, the cold perspirations, 
the dejection of spirits, the muscular debility. There was 
some speaking still, but no discussion. Robespierre, Saint- 
Just, Couthon, Collot-d'Herbois, Billaud-Varennes, attended 
to read their reports, amid the horrors of silence. No one 
dared breathe, nor look at another significantly, nor es- 
pecially utter a word in contradiction. The timid sought 
refuge in a feigned enthusiasm; the bold muttered the 
excuses of fear. The initiative in all measures had passed 
to the Jacobin Club, the armed force to the Commune, and 
the supreme direction of the Police to Robespierre. The 



D A N T O N . 39 

triumviral minority opposed the majority of the cabinet in 
the Committee of Public Safety. The Convention, now mu- 
tilated by the executions of the Revolutionary tribunal, 
moved neither hands nor lips, as if the current of life had 
been stopped, and the blood had been of a sudden congealed 
in its veins. It had now but the automatical movements of 
a decree-making machine. 

Robespierre, ordinarily so sagacious, ruined himself by 
his disdain of it. He remained for forty days — and forty 
days in those times was an age — without honoring it with 
his presence. He failed to comprehend that with a nation like 
the French, a legislative assembly, whatever it may be, will 
always command an enormous power, even while it would 
seem to be buried in slumber ; tliat the multitude attaches 
itself, whether from duty, or interest, or weakness, or habit, 
to the external signs and the unity of authority ; that the 
government can preserve itself in a revolution only by vigi- 
lant activity and making itself constantly seen and felt in 
the hands that hold it ; that it must never stop, never retire, 
never rest secure, never repose, never sleep. Robespierre 
slept. He imagined he could always maintain his ascend- 
ency over the Convention and the Committees. He accused 
them without supporting himself by insurrection. He dis- 
covered his design before he was ready. He set his foot 
upon a shifting ground which was changing every day, and 
with which he was no longer acquainted ; he stumbled, and 
his accomplices, for fear of falling themselves, only pushed 
him into the abyss. 

But the vulgar, struck with the magnitude of events, al- 
ways suppose men of action to have vast schemes and deep- 
laid contrivances. They will have something marvellous 
in the causes, because there is such in the effects. They 
forget that in France, especially, it is the unforeseen that 
governs. Revolutions spring from the successive generation 
of facts, sometimes from accident, scarce ever from the pre- 
meditated will of a man, a party, or a system. 

Another common error is that of imagining an admirable 



40 T 11 E C O N V E N T I O X . 

force and unity in the organization of the Convention. There 
was no such thing. Repeatedly it owed its safety but to mere 
chance. In the first place, it had been well nigh subverted 
on the 31st May, by the Girondists. At a later period, Dan- 
ton would have triumphed over it, were it not for a ruse of 
Saint-Just. The cowardice and imbecility of Henriot alone^ 
prevented Robespierre, proscribed the 8th Thermidor but, 
rescued immediately, from becoming again its master. Were 
it not for an opportune charge of cavalry, the populace, drunk 
with carnage and blood, had gone on to deliberate, the 1st 
Prairial, in the sanctuary of the legislature, headed by some 
insurgent deputies, after having broken open the doors of 
the hall, massacred Ferrand, and dispersed the Convention. 
Lastly, were it not for the hero of the 13th Vendemiaire, the 
sections of Paris would have slain on the spot the whole 
national representation. 

The Mountainists, like the rest, suffered from the anar- 
chy of action and opinion. There were several Moun- 
tains ; the Mountain of Marat, who stood all alone since he 
was repudiated by both Danton and Robespierre ; the Moun- 
tain of Danton and his friends Camille Desmoulins, Legendre, 
and Lacroix ; the Mountain of Robespierre, Couthon, and 
Saint-Just; the Mountain of Billaud-Varennes, Tallim, 
Barrere, Collot-d'Herbois ; the Mountain of Bourbotte and 
Gougon. They befouled each other by turns with mire 
and blood. Such, unfortunately, is the history of all par- 
ties in almost all assemblies. In times of peace, abuse ; in 
times of revolution, death. 

Let it then no more be said that the Convention was a 
body perfectly free, orderly, consistent, controlling, arbiter 
of fact as well as law, and absolute and spontaneous mistress 
of its own movements. The Convention, from its opening 
down to the destruction of the Girondists, was but an arena 
of death between the two parties. After the Girondists, 
obedience unquestioning. Under Robespierre, terror and 
silence. After Robespierre, counter-terror, with rare inter- 
missions. 



D A N T ON. 41 

To decree unanimously the arrest of the Girondists, unan- 
imously that of Danton, unanimously Saint-Just; to vote 
unanimously, the 8th Thermidor, the printing of Robes- 
pierre's speech, and the next day his death ; was that rea- 
son, consistency, liberty ? Strange situation ! the Convention 
proved itself the most sovereign and the most subject of all 
our assemblies, the most speech-making and most mute, the 
most gesticulating and most serious, the most independent 
at intervals and most continuously domineered ; and it is 
precisely because it was at the disposalof the Revolutionary 
Government, an instrument, powerful, dependent, passive, 
undivided, that this government was able to mow down its 
enemies all around it, and impose upon them the silence of 
victory or of terror. 

Strictly, the Convention was but the chief secretary of 
the Revolution. The Committees of public safety and of 
general security governed alone. To this dictatorship of 
the Committees, much rather than to the Convention, it is 
that we are to attribute all the evil that was then committed, 
and also all that was achieved of great and victorious. What 
men of iron were all those members of the Committees of 
public safety and general security ! what obstinacy of will ! 
what precision of direction ! what promptitude of execution ! 
War, marine, finance, provisioning, police, internal affairs, 
foreign relations, legislation, they were adequate to, and at 
home in all ! They made speeches at the Jacobin clubs, 
deliberated in the Committees, made reports to the Conven- 
tion, worked fifteen hours a day, drew up plans of attack 
and defence, corresponded with fourteen armies, and organ- 
ized victory. 

At the same time kings, deputies and ministers, regulators 
and reporters, chiefs and agents, they sustained the weight 
of the government in its whole and its details. Power over- 
flowed, so to speak, in their hands. It was co-extensive 
with their will, and limited but by the scaffold. If they 
dared too far, they were called dictators; if not enough, 

4* 



42 T H E C O N V E N T I O N' . 

conspirators. Omnipotent over all, but responsible for all — 
responsible by death for success as for defeat. 

The office of representative was not in those times a 
place of leisure or of profit. Files of cannon, with the 
matches lighted, were to be passed through in going to the 
Assembly. The way was lined with hedges of pikes and 
muskets. You entered the hall a king, you knew not if 
you should not come out an outlaw. The president, Boissy- 
d'Anglais put on his hat, without blinking, before thc-severed 
head of the deputy Ferrand, which some women, with torn 
hair and covered with blood, were hoisting on the top of a 
pike. Laujuinais coolly continued his speech, while the 
pistol of the assassin was resting upon his ear. Robespierre, 
with Jiis jaw all shattered, lay on the floor in a room ad- 
joining the Convention. Some other deputies stabbed them- 
selves not two paces distant, in the court-room of the Revo- 
lutionary tribunal. Others drank poison, to escape the ex- 
ecutioner. These were spectacles quite ordinary. 

Between political parties v/ho decimate and immolate one 
another, pity and hope find no place. Mountainists against 
Girondists, Mountainists against Mountainists, it was neces- 
sary to con:ibat : combating, it was necessary to vanquish ; 
vanquished, it was inevitable to die. 

Was Vergniaud a federalist ? Was Danton conspiring 
against the republic ? Was Robespierre aspiring to the 
dictatorship ? This is what sudden arrests and turbulent 
proceedings, witiiout documents, without proofs, without 
witnesses, without defence, without confrontation, without 
forms or rules of trial, without free accusers, without an im- 
partial tribunal, without a serious jury, have not as yet 
sufficiently shown, in my eyes at least. They were de- 
nounced, stigmatized, and decimated by each other ; they 
have not been impartially judged. 

History will say that these men had been by turns pro- 
scribers and proscribed, judges and victims ; that they had 
been fanatical rather than ambitious, — rather enthusiastic 
than cruel. It will say that the vices of these times are to 



D A N T O N . * 43 

be imputed rather to the nature of revolutionary institutions, 

than to the men who served as their instruments 

The accounts given of the Convention, even those written 
still in our own day, contain more romance than history. 
We invest the men of 1793 with our own opinions, our 
'ideas, our systems of the moment, our prejudices, our 
Utopias, and with a certain cast of mind which they never 
had, and wiiich, let us own, we had not ourselves ten 
years ago. Confusion of opinions reigns here as in all else. 
Thus, for example, some will have it that Robespierre was 
but the stipendiary agent of the Bourbons and England; 
otliers that he aspired openly to be dictator; — these, that he 
contemplated the establishment of absolute equality ; those, 
that his sole pleasure was to steep himself in blood, like a 
hyena. Many will tell you, with an air of profundity, knit- 
ting the brows and shaking the head, that Robespierre has 
not been understood, and they thus give loose to all sorts of 
hypotheses. After this, I too may be permitted to form one 
in my turn ; and if, after having read and re-read his 
latest speeches in the Convention, I have penetrated their 
meaning, I should say that Robespierre seems to me to have 
been on the point of arresting the car of terror on the steep 
of the Revolution. 

But I might well be mistaken in launching into the inde- ^ 
fmiteness of supposition. 1 am no publicist of imagination. 
I do not wish to imitate those commentators, who, in their blind 
worship of antiquity, ascribe to Virgil and Homer certain 
artifices of style and imitative melodies, which Homer and 
Virgil had never dreamt of. In this way our publicists of 
imagination have discovered, after the event, that Robespierre 
and Saint-Just had ready organized certain plans of demo- 
cratic reform and levelling, of which their discourses do not 
give even the slightest intimation. People are unwilling to 
see all leaders of revolutions possess themselves, by storm, 
of the existing government ; after which, if their adversaries 
resist, and as long as they resist, they tumble them from off 
the walls into the trench. These men are but the instru- 



44 T II E C O N V E N T I O N . 

men'.s of a Providence, of whom they think themselves 
movers. They are chained down to a certain career by the 
succession of facts and by the logic of principles, which 
hurry them on unconsciously, and conduct them often 
whither they do not wish to go, and especially whither they 
do not know tliat they are going. For the rest, a thing in- 
credible ! Robespierre and Saint-Just viewed nature, as she 
is seen on the stage and amid the decorations of the opera, in 
pastoral perspective, with singing choirs of venerable old 
men and bands of rose-crowned village girls. They moral- 
ized speculatively on liberty and equality, with less elo- 
quence than Rousseau, but also with less pedagoguism. 
As organizers, they were neither more nor less advanced than 
the rest of the Mountainists. They lived from^ay to day, 
like all party leaders, in times of open revolution : too en- 
grossed v/ith the care of getting rid of their enemies and 
defending themselves, to think of aught else. In them, ac- 
tion left no time for thought, and the present absorbed the 
future. 

The Revolution swept them off, — overwhelmed them in 
its waves. But an edifice is not built in the current, but 
on the shore. 

Be that as it may, what remains incontestable, — and this 
is all we are concerned with, — is the prodigious impulse im- 
pressed upon the world by the colossal might of France, 
when, bursting from around it the chains of absolute mon- 
archy, it arose and walked forth erect in its strength and 
liberty. Every village from the Pyrenees to the Rhine, 
from the Alps to the ocean, received and nourished the seeds 
of liberty. The contempt of death, the tragic grandeur of '^ 
the events, the enthusiasm of glory, attempered those souls 
of steel, — those hardy generations of our fathers. The 
France of that day was but one vast camp, a manufactory 
of muskets and cannons, an arsenal of war. Mothers made 
offering of their sons to the country ; young husbands tore 
themselves from the arms ^ of their wives; legions of sol- 
diers sprung up as if out of the earth. Barefooted, without 



D A N T O N . 45 

clothes, without bread, often without ammunition, they car- 
ried, at the point of the bayonet, the intrenchments and the bat- 
teries of the enemy. What captains ! Foubert, buried wdth 
the banner of Novi for his winding-sheet ; Hoche, the paci- 
ficator of La Vendee ; Marceau, the hero of Wissemburg ; 
Pichegru, that rapid conqueror of Holland ; and Moreau, 

who since but then he triumphed at Nerwind ! 

These generals of the Republic were after to become the 
glorious marshals of the Empire. Ney, Soult, Murat, 
Massena, Lannes, Lefevre, Davoust, Augereau, and above 
them all Bonaparte, greater perhaps than Napoleon. This 
young general of the Convention, who bombarded St. Roche, 
was destined one day to shake all Europe with his tread, 
and to sit, crowned by the Pope, upon the throne of the 
Caesars. Those ragged soldiers were to make with him the 
circuit of the globe, encamp at the foot of the Pyramids, 
conquer Italy, and, wreathed with the laurels of Arcole, of 
Aboukir, of Marengo, of Austerlitz, and of Jena, to plant 
their triumphant eagles on the towers of Vienna, Lisbon, 
Rome, Amsterdam, Madrid, Berlin, and Moscow. Around 
the Revolution, as if to form it a magnificent retinue, 
moved a host of men of genius : some already illustrious ; 
others on the eve of becoming so : — in the sciences, Laplace, 
Lagrange, Biot, Carnot, Monge, Cuvier. Chaptal, Berthollet, 
Larrey, Pinel, Cabanis, Bichat, Dupuytren ; in the fine 
arts, David, Gros, Girodet ; in literature, Lebrun, Fon- 
taines, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Chenier, Chateaubriand ; 
in politics, Talleyrand, and Sieyes ; in legislation, Camba- 
ceres, Treilhard, Berlier, Zangiacomi, Daunon, Merlin ; 
vin administration, Portalis, Defermon, Regnault de Saint- 
Jean d'Angely, Allent, Regnier, Thibeaudeau, Fouche, 
Real, Pastoret, Simeon, Boulay de la Meurthe. 

The Convention reigned then over a period of no vulgar 
order, or a generation without virtue, genius and glory. It 
had its warriors, its savants, its artists, its jurists, its states- 
men. It had also its orators. 

Parliamentary eloquence always breathes the passions, 



46 THE CONVENTION. 

and takes the hue of the times. The eloquence of the Con-, 
vention, it must be owned, was often rather the eloquence 
of a club, or a court of sessions, than the lofty and learned 
eloquence of the tribune, than the eloquence of Mirabeau. 
J In respect of art, of style, of science, of arrangement, of 

proof, of method, there is no Mountainist or Girondist orator 
who can compare with the princes of the modern tribune. 
In respect of oratorical effect, on the contrary, I am not 
aware that any one of these princes has ever, notwithstanding 
the most wonderful efforts of speech, wrested a solitary 
vote from the trafficking and narrow-minded tenacity of our 
burgess Chambers, while Robespierre, Barrere, and especially 
Danton have several times carried off decrees of the Con- 
, vention by main force. 

"*^ These men were powers, and we are very excellent 
organ-players, — the finest sounds in the world, but nothing 
beside. 

The eloquence of those times was uncouth, inflated, 
strong, gigantic, like the Revolution it was defending ;— 
ours is sometimes debased to the proportions of those Don 
Quixotes, with lame legs and long arms, which are seen on 
the sign-boards of our village taverns ; — theirs smelled of 
cannon powder ; — ours sometimes savors of molasses and 
beet-root ; — theirs exalted the intellectual interests of soci- 
ety ; — ours the material interests ; — theirs was vehement to 
denunciation, coarse to outrage ; — ours is sneering, in- 
tricate, loquacious, hypocritical ; — theirs led its orators to 
poverty, to persecution, to ostracism, the prison, the scaf- 
fold ; — ours elevates its heroes by flowery ascents to the 
purple and fine linen of opulence and the honors of the min- 
istry. 

Whether from difficulty of invention, from custom, or from 
a classical education, the republicans of 1793 endeavored 
to revive, in their costumes, their attitudes, and their har- 
angues, Sparta, Athens, and Rome. Strange! these most sav- 
age of demagogues had a sincere admiration for the laws, the 



D A N T O N . 47 

manners, the apparel, the usages, the character, the speeches, 
the life and the death of the proudest and most insolent aris- 
tocrats of antiquity. 

The Greek bonnet was assumed, the plaited head-dress, 
and the long military cloak. Letters, the sole consolation 
of sensitive and delicate minds, were proscribed. The dear- 
est friends were condemned to death, in affectation of the dis- 
natured paternity of the first Brutus. Kings were detested 
with the frenzied hatred of Horatius Codes. Some devoted 
themselves, some opened their veins, some tore out their vi- 
tals, some plunged desperately into the doom that av.'aited 
them, after the manner of Decius, of Regulus, of the senators 
of Tiberius and of Nero in Rome enslaved. Oath was made 
to die on their legislative seats, like the old Romans in their 
curule chairs. The dictatorship of the Committees and of 
the Convention was threatened with the dagger of Harmo- 
dius, and with the Tarpeian rock. People affected the fru- 
gality of^ Cincinnatus and of the Spartans. The name of 
their enemies was written in red ink, on the proscription 
lists, in commemoration of Sylla. The immortality of the 
soul was decreed, in view of the dying Cato. To dispense 
from wearing any, it was observed, that the democrat, Jesus 
Christ, had never worn breeches. You were outlawed, with- 
out trial, as the proscribed were by the Romans interdicted 
fire and water. Nature was stifled, justice was violated, 
liberty was abused, virtue itself was exaggerated, in order 
the nearer to resemble them. 

So much for the exterior part of oratory, which is con- 
versant about forms, movements, and images. As for their 
political philosophy, financial economy and definitions of 
rights and duties, it was the philosophy, economy and the 
definitions of Rousseau and of the Encyclopedists. 

At the Commune of Paris, at the Club of the Jacobins, in 
the popular societies,, in the government Committees, in the 
bulletins of the army, at the bar of the Assembly, in the 
public places, at the foot of the scaffold, everywhere and on 
all occasions, it was substantially the same ideas, the same 



48 T II E C O N V E N T I O N . 

vehemence, the same grandeur, the same figures, the same 
exclamations, the same imitations, the same apologies, the 
same vocabulary, the same language. 

In this revolutionary drama, in this oratorical exhibition, 
so vivid, so excited, so stirring, so terrible, all is disorder, 
all is agitation, all is confusion — the clubs, the debates, the 
petitioners, the populace ; all places are common, the bar of 
the house, the president's chair, and the tribunes. 

From the ceiling of the hall to the doors, in the lobbies 
both inside and outside, all played their parts, all was action, 
combat, crisis, applause, disapprobation. The sections armed, 
impelled, guided by unknown, invisible leaders, stormed the 
Convention, threw down all before them, pointed out the sus- 
pected deputies, and demanded that, before the house ad- 
journ, they should fall beneath the sword of the law. " The 
people has risen, it is standing, it is waiting !" 

Extraordinary times ! singular contrast ! That Assembly 
which boldly flung its challenges of war to all the kings of 
Europe, quailed itself before the threats and insults of a few 
foaming demagogues, and pushed its forbearance or rather 
its pusillanimity so far as to accord them the honors of the 
sitting. 

Sometimes, the Sections came to stimulate the tardiness of 
Robespierre himself, and did not consider his constitution to 
be all sufficiently democratic. 

"You who occupy the Mountain, worthy sans-culottes, 
will you remain forever slumbering on the summit of that 
immortal rock ? How long will you sufl?er the forestallers 
to drink from their golden cups the purest blood of the peo- 
ple ? Mountainists, arise in your might, nor close your 
career in ignominy." 

The Mountain was indignant, but swallowed the insult. 
The Revolutionary Commune of Paris, the mayor at its 
head, admitted to the bar, spoke as follows : 

" Mountain forever celebrated in the annals of history, be 
the Sinai of Frenchmen ! Hurl forth amid thy thunders the 
eternal decrees of justice and of the popular will ! quake 



D A N TO N. 49 

and tremble at its voice ! Holy Mount ! be the crater whose 
burning lava shall consume the wicked !" 

And pursuing this metaphor, Gaston replied : " Paris, like 
iEtna, will vomit from her bosom the calcined aristocracy." 
The general mind, elevated gradually by the excitement 
of speaking, was transported into a state of frenzy. Le- 
gendre used to exclaim, "Should a tyrant arise, he will die 
by my hand. I swear it by Brutus !" And Drouet : " Be 
ye brigands for the public weal, I say, be brigands !" 

Those are, for the rest, but accidents of situation and of 
character, and it must not be imagined that all the actors of 
the revolutionary drama grinned and gamboled like maniacs 
and idiots. How many of them, born in or near the lowest 
ranks of the people, have evinced an unconquerable love of 
equality, a becoming originality of bearing and language, a 
strong and colored eloquence, a vehement diction, a prompt- 
ness of attack, an intrepidity of defence, a disinterestedness, a 
noble poverty, a respect for the sovereignty of the people, a 
filial affection for the country, a renouncement of all personal 
and local interests, a generous and powerful instinct of glory, 
of grandeur, and of union, which is found no more scarcely 
since their departure. 

There — for it was a field of battle— there was encamped 
in the ranks of the Girondists, Gaudet, whose eloquence 
came from the heart, but who shed its light only at rare in- 
tervals. It was he, who, looking Robespierre in the face, 
said to him : " As long as a drop of blood shall flow in my veins, 
1 Iiave a heart too high, I have a, soul too proud, to acknow- 
ledge any other earthly sovereign than the people." 

— Louvet, a witty and vigorous writer, an animated and 
brilliant orator, who opened the attack against the Mountain 
with more courage than prudence. 

— Languinais, a headstrong Breton, inflexible in his opin- 
ions, a learned publicist. He shrunk from no danger. He 
compounded with no sophism. Feeble in body, intrepid in 
spirit, he fought word for word^esture for gesture. He 
>vould hold by, he would rivet himself to, the tribune. When 



50 T H E C O N V E N T I N . 

his resignation as deputy was clamorously called for, with 
threats and abuses, he let fall with majesty the following 
beautiful words : " Remember that the victim ornamented 
with flowers and led to the altar, was not insulted by the 
priest who was about to immolate it." 

— Bazire, who uttered a sublime apothegm : the draft of 
a Constitution being under discussion, he said : " The French 
people do not make peace with an enemy who occupies its 
territory." 

Mercier : '' Provisions of this nature are written or erased 
with the point of the sword ; have you then made a treaty 
with victory ?" 

Bazire : " We have made it with death.'' 

— Camille Desmoulins, endowed with an imagination too 
ardent, and a heart too susceptible. He loved liberty to 
idolatry, and his friends better than himself. With giddy 
temerity, he attempted to thwart the career of the Revolu- 
tion. He would drive it backwards, after having launched 
it on its impetuous course, and he was crushed beneath the 
wheels of the car that bore the fortunes of Robespierre. 

Camille had an impressive countenance, and his gestures 
were oratorical. But an impediment of speech forbade him 
the tribune, and his hot-headedness did not allow him to 
connect, to arrange his ideas in a skilful and temperate dis- 
course. A pamphleteer rather than orator, a pamphleteer 
ingenious, but somewhat coarse. Passionate, simple, pictu- 
resque in style, but too often destitute of logic and of taste, 
his pamphlets are at times gloomy, and at other times bril- 
liant, always incoherent, like a sick man's dreams, some- 
times, and at intervals, full of happy raillery, naturalness;, 
and grace. He began to fear at length for those who were 
afraid. He suffered for those who were suffering. He bor- 
rowed the vigorous pencil of Tacitus to paint the tyrants of 
the people. He turned round and round in their wounds 
the dagger of sarcasm. He tried remorse, he tried pity, but 
it was all too late. Vainly did he precipitate himself, head 



v anny < 
mk imb 



foremost, from the bank imb the torrent for the purpose of 



D A N T O N. 51 

restraining and guiding it; the wave rolled on and the to.- 
rent swept him away. He was cast into the dungeons of 
the Revolutionary tribunals, and it is thence that, first, as he 
was about to ascend the scaffold, he addressed to his young 
wife, to his Lucile, that touching letter of which the close 
cannot be read without tears : " Adieu, Lucile, my dearest 
Lucile, I feel the shore of life receding before me. I still 
behold my Lucile ! my longing eyes still see thee ! my lov- 
ing arms entwine thee ! my fettered hands embrace thee I 
and my severed head reposes on thy bosom. I die." 

— Vergniaud, a man of great flexibility and compass of in- 
tellect, a sincere patriot, an orator, elegant, unctuous, meta- 
phorical — too metaphorical, perhaps — of wliom this apo- 
thegm has been retained : " The Revolution is like Saturn, 
it devours its own children." 

And this comparison, at the time so much applauded : 
" If our principles are propagated but slowly in foreign na- 
tions, it is that their splendor is obscured by anarchical so- 
phistries, by disorderly movements, and above all by a blood- 
stained crape. When the peoples of the earth fell pros- 
trate for the first time before the sun, was it, think you, 
while he was veiled with those destructive vapors which 
engender the tempests ? No, doubtless, it was when, in the 
full effulgence of his glory, he was advancing through the 
immensity of space, and shedding on the universe fertility, 
life, and light." 

And his reply to Robespierre : " If we are guilty, and 
that you do not send us before the Revolutionary tribunal, 
you ^re untrue to the people. If wc are calumniated and 
you do not declare it, you are untrue to justice." 

And this apostrophe : " Take care that, in the midst of 
your triumphs, France do not resemble those Egyptian 
monuments which have withstood the ravages of time. The 
stranger, as he passes, is astonished at their grandeur. But 
if he would enter them, what does he find ? heaps of inan- 
imate ashes, and the silence of the grave !" 

Search well, and examine all the celebrated passaees of 



52 T II E C O N V E N T I O N . 

oratory. It is always imagery that strikes the multilude 
in the legislative Assemblies as elsewhere. 

For the rest, he was an orator without substance, without 
solidity, without argumentative force, ill-adapted to sway 
those stormy assemblies wherein petulance of gesture and 
familiar insolence of phrase and expression are the necessary 
accompaniments of the discourse. 

Vergniaud committed, like the other Girondists, the un- 
pardonable fault of attacking persons rather than things, and 
irritating and augmenting the Mountain by his violence. 
Posterity will blame equally both the parties, who turned, at 
the very outset, the legislative hall into an arena of gladiators. 

In front of the Girondists and on the opposite benches of 
the amphitheatre, were seated the Mountainists, their mortal 
enemies. 

— Barrere, an elegant reporter of the victories which Gar- 
net organized. He extemporized the motions, the decrees, the 
addresses, as Danton did his speeches. Less hyperbolical 
in his imagery, more chastened, more literate, more obser- 
vant of the rules of grammar and the proprieties of language ; 
bold at once and discreet; impetuous upon occasion, but 
always provident; sagacious of the direction of the wind 
and of the destination of the storm ; a keen diplomatist, a 
keener deputy. 

— Marat, a man of ferocious instincts and of a base and de- 
graded figure, whom Danton repudiated and Robespierre 
would never approach ; a universal denouncer, who used to 
invoke Saint Guillotine, excite the populace to assassination, 
and, for mere pastime, call for two hundred thousand vioiims, 
the King's head, and a dictator ! A man of whom you 
could not say whether he was more cruel than insane ; a 
buffoon and a trifler, without dignity, without decency, with- 
out moderation. He would toss about on his seat like a de- 
moniac, leap up, clap his hands, burst into loud laughter, 
besiege the tribune, frown at the speaker, and let the mob 
place ridiculously on his head, in presence of the Conven- 
tion, a crown of oaken leaves. Addressing the Assembly, 



D A N T O N . 53 

he was in the habit of repeating with emphasis : <' I call you 
to a sense of decency, if you have any left." 

Of his adversaries he used to say : " What a vile clique ! 
O the hags ! O the prison-birds !" He v/ould cry to one 
of the speakers : " Silence, foul fellow !" or, " Thou art a 
scoundrel ! thou art a driveller ! thou art an imbecile !" 

He was abundantly repaid, for from all sides issued in- 
dignant exclamations of, "Hold your tongue, execrable 
wretch !" He was abhorred by the Gironde especially, and 
by most of his colleagues, who showered upon him expres- 
sions of detestation and contempt, all received, it is fair to say, 
with a tranquillity and even an effrontery grotesquely good- 
humored. Marat was no orator. He was not even a vul- 
gar spouter. But no more was he a polemic without some 
talent ; and he sometimes had the perspicacity to divine the 
ambitious among the leaders under their disguises, and the 
courage to tear off their mask. 

— Billaud-Varennes, harsh, morose, atrabilious, inexora- 
ble ; a martyr himself to the republican creed, and who be- 
lieved that, in Robespierre, he was immolating a tyrant. 

— Couthon, the counsellor of Robespierre, of whom Saint- 
Just was the executive ; a paralytic in both legs, and alone 
unable to stir among all those active spirits : Couthon, who, 
sentenced to death, on pretext of having designed to crawl 
up to the rank of sovereignty, contented himself with re- 
plying ironically : « I aspire to become a king !?' 

— Saint-Just, a republican by conviction, austere by tem- 
perament, disinterested by character, a leveller upon system, 
a tribune in the Committees, a hero on the battle-field. 
His youth, which verged upon manhood, was ripe for great 
designs. His capacity was not beneath his situation. A 
gloomy fire beamed in his looks. He had a melancholy ex- 
pression of countenance, a certain inclination for solitude, a 
delivery slow and solemn, a soul of iron intrepidity, a deter- 
mined will, an object ever fixed and distinct before his eyes. 
He elaborated his reports with a studied dogmatism. He 
seasoned them with scraps of metaphysics taken from Hobbes 



54 T II E C O N V E N T I O N . 

and Rousseau, and, to the violent and expeditious realities of 
his revolutionary practice, he joined a social philosophy com- 
pounded of humanitarian imaginations and flowery reveries. 

Here are some of his sayings : " The fire of liberty has 
refined us, as the boiling of metals throws off from the cru- 
cible the impure scum." And this word : '• Dare !" And 
this other : " The traces of liberty and of genius cannot be 
effaced in the universe. The world is void of them since 
the days of the Romans, and their memory still fills it." 

His report against Danton is contrived, arranged and con- 
ducted in all its parts with infinite — I had almost said infer- 
nal — art. He begins by incriminating Bazire, Chabot, Ca- 
mille Desmoulins and the others. He reserves Danton for 
the last. There he pauses — he takes a survey of his task, 
and collects all his force to encounter the giant. He reite- 
rates his proofs, he accumulates them, he groups them like 
a battle-axe ; and, to fire the auditory, he apostrophizes 
Danton as if he had been present, as would a criminal pros- 
ecutor in a court of assize. He unrolls the pretended list 
of his treasons, conspiracies and crimes. He unveils Mis 
private life, and discloses his conversations, even confiden- 
tial. He denounces, he stigmatizes him ; he refuses to 
hear him in defence, he does not hear him ; he judges him, 
condemns him, drags him upon the scaffold and beheads 
him with his discourse, more effectually than he would have 
done with the knife of the guillotine. 

— Robespierre, anorator of considerable fluency, practised 
in the harangues of the clubs and the contests of the tri- 
bune ; patient, taciturn, dissembling, envious of the supe- 
riority of others, and constitutionally vain ; a master of the 
subject of discussion and of himself; giving vent to his pas- 
sions only by muttered exclamations ; neither so mediocre 
as his enemies have made him, nor so great as his friends 
have extolled him ; thinking far too favorably and speaking 
much too lengthily of himself, his services, his disinterest- 
edness, his patriotism, his virtue, his justice; bringing him- 
self incessantly upon the stage after laborious windings and 



D A N T O N. 55 

circumlocutions, and surcharging all his discourses with the 
tiresome topic of his personality. 

Robespierre wrote his reports, recited his harangues, and 
scarce ever extemporized but in his replies. 

He could sketch with ability the external condition of the 
political world. He had, perhaps, in a higher degree than 
his colleagues, the views of the statesman ; and whether 
vague instinct of ambition, or system, or ultimate disgust of 
anarchy, he was for unity and strength in the executive 
power. 

His oratorical manner was full of allusions to Greece and 
Rome, and the college truants who thronged the Assembly 
used to listen valiantly, with gaping mouths, to those stories- 
of antiquity. Who, at the present day, would speak in the 
tribune, without smiling irrepressibly, of the Cretans, of La- 
cedemon, of the god Minos, of the general Epimenandos, of 
the long-gowned Roman senators, of the good Numa and 
the nymph Egeria ? 

Interrupted by Vergniaud, who cried to him : " Conclude ! 

" " YeS, I am going to conclude, and against you ! 

against you who " And unrolling the long series of 

his charges, Robespierre becoming animated rose on this oc- 
casion to real eloquence. But, ordinarily, his phraseology 
was false and declamatory. 

Thus, he used to say : " The Girondists instigated in all 
quarters the serpents of calumny, the demon of civil war, the 
hydra of federalism, the monster ,of aristocracy." These 
four figures accumulated in one sentence are ridiculous and 
in bad taste.' 

He would stop suddenly in the middle of his discourse to 
interrogate the people, as if the people were before him ; 
thus making a gross abuse of rhetoric. He was in the habit 
of also dealing out tedious philosophical tirades about vir- 
tue, which were palpable reminiscences of Jean- Jacques 
Rousseau. 

He proceeded regularly by prosopopeias and other figures 
which escape in the heat of oratorical action, and depict 



-56 T I£ E C O N V £ N T I O N . 

more vividly the thought, but vi^hich are entirely out of 
place in a dissertation. Sometimes his images were clothed 
with much eloquence of form : "Do we calumniate the lu- 
minary which gives life to nature, because of the light clouds 
that glide over its effulgent face ?" 

This other idea is beautiful : " Man's reason still resem- 
bles the globe he inhabits. One half of it is plunged in dark- 
ness, when the other is illuminated." 

But what more misplaced in q, report than the following 
accumulation of allusions to the men and things of antiquity ? 
" The cowards ! they dare denounce the founders of the Re- 
public ! the modern Tarquins have the assurance to call the 
senate of Rome an assembly of brigands ! Even so did the 
valets of Porsenna regard Scevola as a madman. Accord- 
ing to the manifestoes of Xerxes, Aristides has pillaged the 
treasury of Greece. With hands full of the plunder and 
stained with the blood of the Roman people, Octavius and 
Anthony ordained throughout the earth that they alone should 
be deemed clement, alone just, alone virtuous. Tiberius 
and Sejanus see in Brutus and Cassius but blood-thirsty as- 
sassins and even cheats." 

For the rest, the Mountainists were^ unqualified, except 
perhaps Barrere and Saint-Just, to range their ideas in a 
logical and skilful order, to make for the end and conclude. 
The reports of Robespierre will not bear analysis. They 
are vitiated by redundancy, confusion and bombast. 

Robespierre scarce ever attacked his enemies directly and 
in front ; he took them underneath and by insinuation ; he 
hurled against them those indirect threats, those expressions 
of sinister significance, such as Tiberius was wont to throw 
outjj in the Roman Senate, against his appointed victims. 

Robespierre was a deist, as was also Saint-Just. But, to 
be a deist and own it publicly, was to be quite religious for 
those times. 

The day preceding his death, in the meridian of his power, 
when he came to denounce to the Convention, the Commit- 
tees of public safety and of general security, he expatiated 



DAN T ON . 57 

with an affected complacency, upon the part of pontiff wliich 
he performed on the festival of the Supreme Being. The 
apostrophe which terminates that episode is not without ani- 
mation and coloring : 

"Citizens, you have attached to the cause of the Revolu- 
tion every pure and generous heart. You have exhibited 
it to the world in all the splendor of its celestial beauty. O 
day forever to be blessed, when the entire French people 
arose to render unto the author of nature, an homage wor- 
thy of his acceptance ! What a touching assemblage of all 
the objects which can delight the eyes and the hearts of 
men ! O honored old age ! O generous ardor of the sons 
of the land ! O pure and simple joy of our young citizens! 
delicious tears of doating mothers ! O divine charm of 
blended innocence and beauty ! O majesty of a great peo- 
ple, happy in the sentiment of its might, its glory and its vir- 
tue ! Being of beings ! beamed the universe, fresh from 
thy omnipotent hands, with a light more agreeable to 'thine 
eyes than did this nation, the day when, breaking the yoke 
of crime and of error, it appeared before thee in an attitude 
worthy of thy regard and of its own destinies ?" 

There is composition and art in this scrap. But was it 
suitably placed between a denunciation to death and a medi- 
tated insurrection ? The orators of the Revolution are full 
of such contrasts. 

Robespierre was quite serious in his festival and restora- 
tion of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul. 
He could not bear the irreligious banter of the other mem- 
bers of the government. He revolted at two things in them, 
their materialism, and having thought themselves capable, 
during forty days, of doing without himself. 

When, at the outset, Robespierre was a butt to the terri- 
ble assaults of Vergniaud and of Louvet, he bowed the 
head and let pass the storm. But as soon as he saw that 
the decimated Convention was yielding, he assumed the tone 
of master. He insisted that the Convention discuss or rather 
decree on the spot, laws the most critical and ferocious -'- . 



53 THE CONVENTION. 

posed at the very instant by the Committee of public safety. 
The tyrannized majority turned pale with anger, and ven- 
geance brooded in every breast. Merlin and Tallien were 
confounded : Bourdon, swallowing the insult, muttered with 
trembling lips : " I esteem Couthon, I esteem the Committee 
of public safety, I esteem the unswerving Mountain that has 
saved Liberty." — This Mountain, sapped in its foundations, 
was speeedily to sink upon itself. 

What an oratorical drama, what a discourse in action, 
was that famous sitting of 9th Thermidor ! — Robespierre 
hurls his terrible impeachment against, his enemies, and 
descends from the tribune. All is silence, all is hesitation ; 
then a lengthening murmur runs from bench to bench. 
The members accost each other, and groups are formed. 
They look scrutinizingly at each other — they count their 
numbers — they consult — they kindle into indignation — they 
break into passion. Robespierre is convulsed — he is ruined. 
Saint-Just flies to his aid, and denounces Tallien. That 
name is scarce passed his lips, than Tallien pale, dismayed, 
half alive, half dead, demands that the veil which covers 
Robespierre be entirely torn away. 

Billaud-Varennes exclaims : " The Convention is between 
two abysses ; it will perish if it falters — " [No ! No f 
it must not perish / — All the members are standing ; they 
wave hats, and vow to save the republic] 

Billaud-Varennes : " Is there here a single citizen who 
would consent to live under a tyrant?" [No! No! perish 
the tyrants f] 

Robespierre rushed to the tribune. [A great number of 
voices : Down with the tyrant ! down / dow7i /] 

Then Tallien : " I have witnessed yesterday the proceed- 
ings of the Jacobins, I have trembled for the country ! I have 
seen in training the army of the new Cromwell, and I have 
armed myself with a dagger to pierce him to the heart !" 
[Vehement acclamations .~\ 

Robespierre, his back against the railing of the tribune, 
repeats his demand to be heard, he begins to speak. [His 



D A N T O N . 59 

voice is lost amid reiterated cries of, Down loith the tyrant f 
doion ! down with him /] 

Robespierre persists : Tallien pushes him back and pro- 
ceeds with his accusation. — Then Robespierre casts an in- 
terrogating look towards the most ardent of the Mountainists : 
some turn aside the head, the others remain motionless. 
He invokes the Centre : " It is to you, men of purity and 
patriotism, that I address myself, and not to those brigands — " 
[Violent interruptions.] "For the last time, president of 
assassins, I demand the floor." [No! No! — The up- 
roar continues ; Robespierre is exhausted from his eflTorts ; 
his voice is become hoarse.] 

Gamier : " The blood of Danton stifles thee !" 

This Danton, whose blood mounted into the throat of 
Robespierre and was suflbcating him, this Danton whom I 
am now about to portray, this Danton, the inferior of Mira- 
beau and of him alone, was taller by the head than all the 
other members of the Convention. — He had, like Mirabe^u, 
viewed near, a sallow complexion, sunken features, a 
wrinkled forehead, a repulsive ugliness in the details of the 
countenance. But, like Mirabeau, seen at a distance, and 
in an assembly, he could not fail to draw attention and in- 
terest by his striking physiognomy and by that manly beauty 
which is the beauty of the orator. — The one had something 
of the lion and the other of the bull-dog — both emblematic 
of strength. 

Born for the highest eloquence, Danton might, in antiquity, 
with his thundering voice, his impetuous gestures, and the 
colossal imagery of his discourses, have swayed from the 
height of the popular tribune the tempestuous waves of the 
multitude. — An orator from the ranks of the people, Dan- 
ton had their passions, understood their character, and 
spoke their language. Pie was enthusiastic, but sincere — 
without malice, but without virtue — suspected of rapacity, 
though he died poor — coarse in his manners and his conver- 
sation — sanguinary from system rather than temperament, he 
cut off heads, but without hatred, like the executioner, and 



^0 T II E C O N V E N T I O N . 

his Machiavelian hands trickled with the carnage of Sep- 
tember. Abominable as well as false policy ! he excused 
the cruelty of the means by the greatness of the end. 

Two men have by turns ruled the Revolution — both at 
the same time similar and different — Danton and Robes- 
pierre. — Both party chiefs and masters of the Convention — 
both pushing onto the extremest measures — both intelligent in 
the state of affairs at home and abroad — both men of counsel 
and of combat — both accused of treason, of tyranny, and of 
dictatorship — both refused a hearing in their personal de- 
fence, for having refused to hear others — both decreed to 
prosecution by the unanimous vote of their own accomplices 
— both found guilty by the Revolutionary Tribunal they had 
themselves erected — both outlawed — both immolated, almost 
in the bloom of life, Danton by Robespierre, and Robespierre 
on account of Danton — both, in fine, dragged to the same 
punishment in the same cart and upon the same scaffold. 

Danton was intemperate, abandoned in his pleasures, and 
greedy of money, less to hoard than to spend it ; Robespierre, 
sombre, austere, economical, incorruptible. — Danton, indo- 
lent by nature and by habit : Robespierre, diligent in labor, 
even to. the sacrifice of sleep. — Danton disdained Robes- 
pierre, and Robespierre contemned Danton. — Danton \vas 
careless to a degree of inconsistency ; Robespierre, bilious, 
concentrated, distrustful, even to proscription. — Danton, 
boastful of his real vices, and of the evil which he did, and 
a pretender even to crimes which he had never committed : 
Robespierre, varnishing his animosity and vengeance with - 
the color of the public weal. 

Robespierre, a spiritualist ; Danton, a materialist, little 
concerned to know what, after death, should become of his 
soul, provided his name was inscribed, as he expressed it, 
" in the Pantheon of history." 

Danton displayed, in his furrowed forehead and in his 
burning eyes, the vehemence and the tumultuous passions 
of his soul ; Robespierre dissembled his wrath under the im- 
perturbability of his features. — Danton awed you by his ath- 



D A NTO N. 01 

letic stature and the broken peals of his thundering voice ; 
Robespierre froze the accused by his speech, and terrified 
them by his oblique glance. — Danton, like a tiger, sprung 
upon his prey : Robespierre, like a serpent, coiled himself 
around it. — Danton retired, after the battle, to his tent, and 
went to sleep ; Robespierre never thought he had demolished 
enemies enough as long as there remained any still to 
be demolished. — Danton forgot himself in the dangers of 
his country, and compromised himself for his friends ; Robes- 
pierre, in serving the cause of liberty, was never unmindful 
of himself He used to trumpet his own praise, and was 
fond of gazing at himself in the mirror of his pride. — 
Robespierre had more talent ; Danton, more genius. 

Danton gave himself up to the inspiration of the moment, 
kindled as he went by his voice and gesture, and scattered 
hyperboles by handfuls through his speeches ; Robespierre, 
impassive, collected, advanced cautiously in the debate, and 
calculated every step of his elaborate movements. 

Danton proceeded by bounds and gambols, going direct to 
the subject, fiery and petulant in his exordiums, presumptu- 
ous to excess, accustomed to the triumphs of popular har- 
anguing, and too confident of that success, without adverting 
to the accidents of popularity and absence. — Robespierre 
spun out artfully the web of toils wherein his enemies were 
to be ensnared, held his threat suspended over several at 
the same time, and let it fall, like the thunderbolt, but at the 
close of his discourse. 

Danton ended with some rhetorical flourishes, but without 
coming to any conclusion. Robespierre, less brilliant, but 
more precise, less impetuous, but more adroit, did not vainly 
beat the air, did not talk for the sake of talking, never lost 
sight of his object, and closed but by a decree of accusation 
drawn up in due form, and submitted for the immediate ac- 
ceptance of the Convention. 

Danton imagined that he had but to present himself to 
commence the combat, and but to combat single-handed to 
secure a triumph ; Robespierre sought in the effervescence 

6 



62 THECONVENTION. 

of the Jacobins and in the arnacd force of the Commune, a 
bugbear against the Committees and the Convention itself. 
— There was in the case of Danton less of treachery than 
of remissness, less of forgetful ness of the Revolution than 
of himself, and in that of Robespierre more wounded vanity 
than aspiration to the dictatorship, more of rancorous spleen 
than of premeditated tyranny. — Danton perished through 
excessive confidence in himself; Robespierre, through ex- 
cessive suspicion of his accomplices. — Danton passed like a 
meteor over the horizon of the Convention; Robespierre 
held the Assembly, the Committees, and the Clubs in depend- 
ence upon him, and governed without being minister, 
reigned without being king, and gave his terrible name 
to the epoch. 

Parliamentary eloquence, in our monopoly Chambers and 
complicated governments, is, generally, but mere sound, 
empty phrases and nothing beside. But in those days a 
popular dictator, a tribune, a Danton, by the power, the 
energy, and the action of his oratory could put in motion an 
army of six hundred thousand men, repel a foreign invasion 
beyond the frontiers, demolish whole categories of outlawed 
persons, stir up provinces to the inmost recesses, and create, 
as by magic, armies, tribunals, laws, and constitutions. — 
Eloquence legislated, governed, triumphed in the Conven- 
tion, in the Clubs, in the public squares. In the present 
day, the place of deputy is made a ladder to the ministry. 
At that time, we see Danton quit the ministry to remain re- 
presentative of the people. The reason is, that a representa- 
tive of the people was superior to a minister, was in fact 
every thing. 

Danton shut himself up in the Convention, as in a fortress 
bristling with cannon, of which one half was turned against 
its defenders, and the other against the enemy. There, he 
fired through every breach, and none disputed his exercise 
of the chief command. But when the Convention was split 
into two rival camps, Danton hesitated. Had he sided with 
the Gironde, he would have crushed Robespierre. But im- 



D A N T O N . 63 



prudently repulsed and pressed by the Girondists against 
the foot of the Mountain, he ascended it and surrendered 
himself desperately to his destiny. " Ah ! you accuse me," 
said he, to Gaudet, drawing himself up to his full height, 
" you accuse me ! you do not know my power !" — It was 
great, that power ! for he held in his hand, to move the 
Convention, two of the mightiest levers — terror and enthu- 
siasm. — It was great, that power of terror, when he elevated 
upon its gigantic pillars the Revolutionary Tribunal. — 
It was great, that power of enthusiasm, when, kindling 
with his breath the invincible martial ardor of the French, 
which is apt to flag if not kept up unceasingly, he said : 
" What we need, in order to conquer, is audacity, again 
audacity, always audacity !" — And elsewhere : " The peo- 
pie have nothing to give but blood; they give it pro- 
fusely. Come then, mercenary wretches, give you as freely 
of your wealth. What ! you have a whole nation for lever, 
reason for a fulcrum, and you have not yet overturned the 
world ! Throw aside your miserable quarrels, I know but 
the enemy. Let us crush the enemy. What, though they 
call me blood-thirs.ty ? What care I for my reputation ? 
Let France be free, and let my name be given to infamy !" 
— This was a monstrous, but original, energetic, startling 
eloquence, which welled forth by gushes from the breast of 
the orator who enraptured the Assembly and wrung from it 
prolonged peals of unanimous acclamation. 

Here are a few more of the figures of this style of elo- 
quence : 

" A nation in a state of revolution is like the brass which 
simmers and sublimates itself in the crucible. The statue 
of liberty is not yet cast, but the metal is boiling!" 

And this : " Marseilles has declared itself the Mountain 
of the republic. That Mountain will expand its proportions ; 
it will roll down the loosened rocks of liberty, and crush be- 
neath them the enemies of freedom." — x\nd this apothegm 
so just: '• When a people passes from a monarchical to a 
republican form of government, it is carried beyond the end 



64 T II E C U N V E N T I O N . 

by tlie projectile force which it has given itself." — And 
this lofty menace : " It is by cannon-balls that the Conven- 
tion must be made known to our enemies." 

Danton too used to pay tribute to the bad taste of the 
times. For instance, one oPhis celebrated speeches closes 
thus : " I have intrenched myself in the citadel of reason ; 
I will open my way out with the cannon of truth, and I will 
pulverize my accusers." 

Inexhaustible subject for historical meditation ! Oh ! on 
the one hand, what an immense and glorious career had not 
Liberty opened to us, if so many confiscations, so many pro- 
scriptions, so many incarcerations, so many massacres and 
torLurings, so many torrents of blood, so many decapitations, 
so many executioners and victims, had not led us back 
forcibly by the road of anarchy to despotism ! Oh ! on the 
other hand, what perils of death, when the Convention itself 
appeared to hesitate, had not our beloved France incurred, 
our France, one and indivisible, menaced as she was with 
dismemberment and partition, if, in tiiat fatal moment which 
saves or surrenders the life of empires, Danton had de- 
spaired of her cause ! — What proved his ruin, and what 
must have ruined Robespierre too, was much less having 
aspired to govern, than not having governed enough. 

One must not get out of humor with revolutions. He is 
not to stand surveying them as they pass, from tlie heights 
of the beach. It is necessary to embark with them in the 
same bottom, traverse the same tempests, watch the con- 
spiracies day and night, and not quit for an instant the 
helm. 

Danton went to sleep, confiding in the deceitful breeze of 
his popularity. The rudder slipped from his hands. He 
dropped into the deep, and the gulf closed over him. — 
Neither the favor of the Cordeliers, nor the celebrity of his 
name, nor the mem.ory of his services, nor the ill-sup- 
pressed mutterings of the Convention, nor the secret sym- 
pathies of the Revolutionary Tribunal, nor the devotedness 
of his friends, nor the unimportance of the charge, nor his 



DA NT ON. 65 

love for liberty, nor his daring, nor his eloquence — nothing 
could avail to save him. — The knife was raised, and Robes- 
pierre awaited his victim. 

Danton, on his way to execution, passed by the residence 
of Robespierre. He turned about, and with his voice of 
thunder, " Robespierre !" he exclaimed, " Robespierre ! I 
summon thee to appear within three months upon the scaf- 
fold !" He ascends the fatal steps — he embraces for the 
last time his friend, Camille Desmoulins. The executioner 
separates them : " Wretch," said he to him^ " thou canst not 
hinder our heads to kiss each other presently in the basket." 



V' 



THE EMPIRE. 






MILITARY ORATORY. 

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 

Parliamentary eloquence made no great figure under 
the Directory. Under the Consulate and the Empire, it lost 
its freedom and its voice. The Press itself was decapitated 
by the fatal shears of the Censorship. To the agents of 
revolution had succeeded the agents of organization ; to the 
theoretical politicians, the men of practical business ; to the 
orators, the jurists. In the Legislative Body, the Senate, 
the Council of State, the Pulpit, the Bar, true eloquence had 
become unknown. Eloquence — that great art of impassion- 
ating and swaying the masses by means of emotional and 
figurative expression — passed to the military men, or rather 
to one alone of them, to Napoleon Bonaparte. 

The military eloquence, attributed to the ancients, is no 
better than a fiction of their historians and their poets. To 
harangue soldiers, not in. the circus and from the elevation 
of the tribune, but in the presence of the enemy, as is re- 
ported of their generals, would have been admirable, I am 
far from denying it ; but it was plainly impossible. 

These expressions : " Come and take them," of Leoni- 
das to Xerxes ; of Epimenondas dying : '• I leave two 
immortal daughters, Leuctra and Mantinea ;" of Csesar: 
'' I came, I saw, I conquered :" these apothegms may well 
have been spoken, precisely because they are but apothegms. 
But from a sentence of some syllables to a harangue of 







©© Rl A [P^'[^T[E 



NAPOLEO'N BONAPARTE. 67 

some pages, there is a wide distance. There is all the dis- 
tance from truth to falsehood. 

If, in fact, in the Chamber of Deputies, in a hall where 
the repercussion of sounds is favored by its acoustical con- 
struction, there are a hundred members at least, out of four 
hundred, who never hear very distinctly the loudest and most 
practised speakers, how could the generals of antiquity have 
made themselves heard, upon the ground which they may 
chance to occupy on the battle-field, before the extended 
line of a hundred thousand warriors, amid wind and rain, 
which scatter and drown his words at four paces from the 
orator ?' The greater part of these monstrous armies were 
but a horde of barbarians of all countries, chained together 
under the rod of a m*aster, knowing neither to read or write, 
or make themselves intelligible to one another, and under- 
standing each other perfectly but for the purposes of theft, 
murder and pillage. But the illusion favors the predilec- 
tions for antiquity. We unhesitatingly believe those histo- 
rians who make x\lexander, Scipio, Hannibal, speak as if Al- 
exander, Scipio, Hannibal were elaborators of standard phra- 
ses, and who in the thick of the melee., had been specially 
careful not to derange by a comma the grammatical sym- 
metry, or the cadence and measure of a gerund or a sii- 
jnne. 

Moreover, all these fictions of discourse go back but a 
little way. The Greeks were fine speakers, and the heroes 
of old Homer harangue almost as well as they fight. Virgil 
(kd he have even not been satisfied with making speeches 
for mortal men. In their superabundance, they furnish 
them to the gods of Olympus. In imitation of them, Tasso 
puts subtle and labored orations in the mouth of Rinaldo, of 
Solyman and of Godfrey, who, in their quality of warriors, 
prided themselves upon not knowing how to spell a solitary 
letter of the Turkish or the French alphabet. Milton goes 
farther: he ascribes speeches, very beautiful assuredly, to 
the winged seraphim of heaven and to the angels of the 
bottomless pit, to excite the divine and the infernal militia 



68 T H E E M r 1 ll E . 

to fight bravely — with the condition, however, of never kill- 
ing each other, since bodiless souls are insusceptible of 
death. 

The lengthy harangues of Quinctius Curtius are but 
rhetorical essays, which this historian puts in the mouth of 
his Alexander, who is a mere swaggerer. Polybius, Thu- 
cydides, Sallust, Plutarch clothe the Greek and Roman 
heroes in the livery of their own style. It is not Germani- 
cus we read in the " Annals," it is Tacitus unadulterated. 
Livy makes no end of his harangues, and this harmonious 
phrase-maker of the drawing-rooms of Mecsenas, does not 
reflect that he would not have been understood even by the 
generals of ancient Rome. It would be pleasant to see him 
introduce the Chamberlains of Tarquin lisping the iMtois 
of the Etrurian dialect, amid inextinguishable laughter, in 
the polished court of Augustus. It would be very much as 
if Madame de Sevigne would try to make herself under- 
stood by the kitchen-maids of King Childebert. 

The most elegant of our men of letters, M. Villemain, 
would not polish, would not round or point his period with 
more finish in his carefully closed cabinet, than does the 
rude Coriolanus under the walls of infant Rome, or the fero- 
cious Arminius in the swamps of Germany. 

Galgacus, for example, was a sort of savage, bristled, 
hairy and bearded from head to foot. He emitted from a 
shrill gullet certain inarticulate cries, brandishing his sword 
meanwhile. He was not well versed in prosodial elisions 
or ablatives absolute, and it is more than probable that m 
had not had time to finish his philosophy at the University 
of Oxford. Very well ! Tacitus makes him a rhetorician, 
a species of perpetual secretary of the French Academy. 
His whole speech is varnished and brushed. Nothing is 
wanting — exordium, plan, proofs, peroration, and besides, 
logic, vehemence, color. Add to which, an admirable 
painting af manners and the style of the great masters. He 
might have been envied by Cicero. 

These historians had all spent their youth sweating mind 



NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 69 

and body in scholastic disputation. Their elaborate ha- 
rangues smell of the lamp. Moreover, portraits and 
speeches were, as there is ground to conjecture, very much 
in fashion at that time, and to please the public of that day, 
the historians made them portraits and speeches. 

In fine, the Romans and Greeks, folk of large imagina- 
tion, have always been lovers of fictions in religion, in 
government, in poetry, in legislation, in every thing. If 
we are to judge of the truth of the facts related by Sallust, 
Livy, Quinctius Curtius and Tacitus, according to the 
genuineness of the harangues they report to us, there is no 
great reliance to be had upon all those histories. 

What adds still to the improbability of these speeches, is 
their very extemporaneousness. For it is not said that they 
were dictated to a secretary, nor that he attended the gen- 
eral for the purpose of collecting them. They were not 
graven upon tablets overlaid with wax. They were not 
affixed to the palisades of the camp. They were not read 
during the watches by the fire-light of the bivouac. They 
were not committed to memory to be recited to others. 

At the present day, the military harangues are not ex- 
temporized. They would not be heard amidst the clatter- 
ing of muskets and bayonets, the prancing and neighing of 
horses, the coughings, sneezings, talkings, whisperings and 
caperings of men. The general would find it impossible 
to bring together upon a point sufficiently concentrated, the 
infantry, the cavalry, and the staff-officers, and the artillery, 
and the attendants, and the requisite genius. In like man- 
ner, he could not conveniently have himself lifted on men's 
shoulders, upon a shield or in a tribune. That would 
savor of preparation, that would be ridiculous. The gen- 
eral speaks, therefore, less to the ear of the soldier than to 
his mind. He encourages him before the engagement, he 
congratulates him after the victory. The harangues are 
inserted in the order of the day, and this is posted and read, 
on the walls, trees, or camp-stakes — is repeated, is conned 



70 T H E E M P I R E . 

at the bivouacs, on the watch, and may be multiplied at 
will by impression. 

There is possibility, truth, a result in the modern military 
orations. But it is beyond comprehension, I repeat, what 
was meant by improvisation in the armies of antiquity, and 
what could have been the effect, the import of those words 
scattered to the wind, and which must have dropped, un- 
heard, at the very feet of the speaker. Every address of 
any length ascribed to the ancient generals, is therefore a 
mere historical ornament, a fiction, an invention, a lie. 

Ca3sar alone escapes this criticism, because Csesar was 
not only an orator, but also one of the most polished of the 
aristocracy of Rome, in the golden days of her literature. 
Csesar was possessed of every talent and every accomplish- 
ment : at once elegant and athletic, tender-hearted and 
courageous, prudent and peremptory, vehement and sly, 
vast in his plans, bold in execution, proud of his patrician 
birth and familiar with his soldiers, by whom he was adored.' 
At the same time a great general, a great orator, a great 
writer ; he describes in his Commentaries, written by liimself, 
his battles and his speeches. But as Caesar, in common 
with all great minds, was sensible to the vanity of literary 
glory, it is not very certain — at least I should not be sure — 
that he did not recast, amplify, color, embellish, and per- 
haps — were it but for amusement — prepare in the leisure 
of his tent several of those harangues, pretended to be ex- 
temporaneous. After the victory, he bethought him of 
posterity. 

Be that as it may, I, for my part, make no difficulty of 
admitting Ca3sar to have been the first military orator of 
antiquity. Indeed the opinion will not ever be disputed. 
Eloquence so well becomes the conquerors and the masters 
of the world ! 

In modern times, Saint Louis, Philip Augustus, Fran- 
cis 1st, Bayard, Duguesclin have spoken some apothegms 
of military bravery. The addresses of Henry IV. especially 
are brief, taking, full of soul, sparkling with wit. But all 



NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 71 

these kings, all these captains were placed but amid a 
small circle of nobles. It was to nobles that Francis 1st 
left for his adieu this celebrated apothegm : " All is lost, 
gentlemen, except honor." This very word, honor, is a term 
of chivalry. It is to one of his knights that Louis XII, at 
Aignadel, replied : " Let those who are afraid take shelter 
behind me !" It was to a knight, to Crillon, that Henry IV. 
wrote : " Hang thyself, brave Crillon ; we have fought at 
Arques and thou wast not there." It was to nobles, to the 
princes of Conde and of Nemours, that he cried : " For 
God ! gentlemen, onward ! I will let you see that I am 
your senior brother." And these noble words which he 
spoke while running forward : " Follow my plume, you 
will always find it on the road to victory." But is there 
not^mething of feudalism in such sentiments and sayings ? 
WOTHd you not think these chivalric sceptre- wearers more 
proud of being gentlemen than of being kings ? It was the 
manners and the spirit of the times, and it is but just to 
say such princes were preferable to institutions. 

There was, under the ancient kings of France, a body 
of brave and well-disciplined troops. There was as yet no 
national army. The grand military eloquence had its 
birth with liberty in the wars of the Revolution. But many 
of the heroes who led our armies had more courage than 
literature. They knew better how to conquer than to talk. 
It was not speaking even then, it was singing. The Mar- 
seillaise gained more battles than the finest orations. There 
was no need of warlike exhortations to rush, bayonet in hand, 
upon the Austrian columns. Every citizen was a soldier, 
and every soldier in repulsing the enemy, had the heart 
of a commander. The orders of the day of the Convention 
were frequently more eloquent than the allocutions of the 
generals. They ended, amid the unanimous acclamations 
of the Assembly, with these simple words : " The army of 
the Pyrenees, the army of the Rhine, the army of the Sam- 
bre-et-Meuse, the army of the West, the army of Italy have 
merited well of the country." 



72 THEEMPIRR. 

The manly and stern accents of the republican elo- 
quence expired under the Empire. It seemed as if all 
moral energy had ceased to exist save in the head of one 
man, that of Napoleon — and that, in most of his lieutenants, 
it had taken refuge at the extremity of their arms. No 
more impulse, no more origination ; they obeyed, this was 
the whole. One of them used to say : " In the name of 
my august sovereign. His Majesty the Emperor of the 
French, king of Italy and protector of the confederation 
of the Rhine, I have to prescribe to you, officers and sol- 
diers, that each of you do his duty. Another general, more 
servile still, used to write : " By virtue of the orders of His 
Excellency, the marshal of the Empire, commandant of the 
fourth regiment, you will have, soldiers, to run to victory." 

What is to be said of the military eloquence of the Rus- 
sians, the Germans, and the English ? 

Of Suwarrow we have a grand and beautiful piece of 
pantomime, when, to arrest the retreat of the Russians, he had 
his grenadiers dig a trench, wherein, lying down with his de- 
corations, sword, epaulettes, all, he ordered that he should 
be buried alive. For the rest, the Russian generals treat 
their soldiers as abject serfs. They recommend them to 
think, in the battle, of their feudal masters, and adore the 
image of the great Saint Nicholas, in like manner as the 
sword of the archangel St. Michael. Their proclamations 
are pointless, verbose, and fanatical. 

The world has never heard much of the eloquence of 
Austrian archdukes and Swiss princes. 

The English generals are temperate of words. Their 
bulletins of war are almost all simple, brief, and dignified. 
They are neither laudatory nor passionate. They say the 
truth, and go strait to the fact. Their soldiers are cool, in- 
telligent, well-disciplined, brave, less sensible to glory than 
to duty, and to well-turned compliments than to material 
well-being. Their imagination is not to be transported by 
figures of rhetoric ; their heart, not to be moved by accents 
of 'Sensibility. But no more would they bear without mur- 



NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 73 

muring to be told : " You have neither shoes, nor overcoats 
nor wme, nor beer, nor meat, nor bread ; meanwhile, my 
friends, you may fly to victory !" The aristocratic Parlia- 
ment of Great Britain votes her generals and officers, under 
guiso of public testimonials and swords of honor, some mao-. 
nificent pensions. They are a people with whom, not ex- 
cepting glory itself, every thing ends in money. 

The English bulletin is rather dry, I admit, but I should 
prefer it a thousand times,— such is my taste,— to the Span 
ish bulletin, which is still more inflated than our own African 
bulletin, and calls the slightest skirmish a battle, and the 
pettiest skirmisher a hero. It is only in that kingdom that 
one sees Marquises of Fidelity, Princes of Peace, Dukes of 
Victory, two dukes at once of the latter title in the two ad 
verse camps, so that there could never be defeat on either side 
since both must be victorious. It is the Immortal Riego,' 
the Immortal Zumalacarrequi, the Immortal Cabrera, the 
Immortal Espartero, the Immortal Don Quixote ! Heroism 
mummeries, laurels, diamond-headed decorations, illumi! 
nated portraits and snuff-boxes, triumphal entries, bombastic 
harangues; all this happily leads to nothing, and we are 
told the army, the municipalities, and the Cortes must b- 
allowed to give rein to their imagination, and that we must 
be indulgent to this country, because the climate is hot. 

But let us, for the rest, dismiss all tliose haranguers, and 
proceed to Napoleon, who has been the first military orator 
of modern times, as he has been the first chief 

When Providence puts its hand into the crowd, there to 
choose and thence to draw those extraordinary men whom 
it has predestined to represent their generation upon the 
earth and to change the face of empires, it imparts and as- 
signs them the intellectual and the physical powers of so- 
ciety, and it brings them,. at remote intervals, upon the 
stage of the world, but in circumstances which it seems to 
have prepared expressly for their elevation and for their fall 
Such were Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon. 

Greece was out of all patience with rhetoricians and 
7 



71 THE EMPIRE. 

poets, with" usurpation, with civil wars, and great men, . 
when the Asiatic world was opened, with all its riches, its 
ridiculous and despised religions, its enervated satraps, its 
populations rotten before being ripe, its superannuated gov- 
ernments, and its boundless territory, to the ambition of the 
young Alexander. 

The Roman universe, harassed by the disgust ,of the 
great body of the people for a stormy liberty, and by the 
want of unity after the conquests of Asia, Spain, Gaul and 
England, was awaiting but a master, and gave itself still 
more to Ccesar than Csesar desired it. The legions of 
veterans, accustomed to conquest under his command, knew 
no longer but the fasces and the name of Csesar. Rome 
also aspired but to assign him the sceptre of the world,, 
which her feeble hands could no longer bear. 

Napoleon, in his turn, adroitly possessed himself of the 
active forces of the Revolution, which, tired of boiling up 
from the bottom of the crater and sinking back upon them-, 
selves, sought an outlet whereby to diffuse themselves abroad, 
and overflowed in the direction of conquest. He was mas- 
ter, because he had the wish, because he had the ability,, 
and because he had the skill to be one. He absorbed, in 
the unity of his dominion, all conscience, intelligence, and 
liberty. He had boldness because he had genius, and per- 
haps he had genius because he had audacity. He despised 
men, because he understood them. He loved glory, because 
all beside was insufficient to fill the immense void of his 
soul. He devoured time, he devoured space ; he must 
needs live quicker, progress quicker than other men ; he 
weighed the world in his hand and deemed it light. He 
dreamt the eternity of his dynasty and universal monarchy. 

But after having thus exalted the conquerors. Providence 
puts out with a breath the splendor of their diadem, and pre- 
sents them a spectacle to the universe, to teach it that, despite 
their glory and the sublimity of their sway, they are but 
men, and that, like all men, they are subject to the vicissi- 
tudes of life and limited by the nothingness of the grave. 



aPOLEON BONAPARTE. 75 

Thus Alexander perished in the bloom of his age, satiated 
with triumphs and debaucheries, amid the intoxication of a 
royal festival. Caesar fell at the base of Pompey's statue, 
smitten by a republican dagger, when he was about to get 
himself crowned by the Senate, perpetual Emperor of Rome, 
after having brought under her laws the entire globe. In 
fine. Napoleon paused not in the career of his ambition until 
he had been driven upon a solitary rock, surrounded on all 
sides by the billows of the ocean. 

Napoleon was one of those prodigious men who feel them- 
selves born and who are formed for the government and subju- 
gation of nations. Men of this description must die or reign. 
They are raised scarce a step above the rank of common 
soldiers, when they give their commands as if they were 
generals. Though still no more than subjects, they talk 
with the authoritative tone of masters. 

Napoleon was not born, like Alexander, on the steps of a 
throne, nor like Csesar, in the folds of the Senatorial purple. 
But as soon as he put a sword in his hand, he commanded, 
and when he commanded, he reigned. A simple captain, 
he besieged and took Toulon. A general of brigade, he 
organized the defence of the 13th Vendemiaire and saved 
the Convention. A generalissimo of the army of Italy, he 
treated like a king with the kings, the potentates, and the 
Pope. Vanquisher of Egypt, he conducts this expedition 
with the authority of an absolute chief; returns from Africa 
without letters of recall, lands at Frejus, traverses France 
in triumph, makes the Directory quake, draws in his train 
the other generals, expels the two Councils, improvisates a 
new constitution, and takes into his own hands the reins of 
the government. Emperor, he holds under his feet, in mute 
obedience, the Senate, the Legislative body, the adminis- 
tration, the people and the army. So that it may be said 
Napoleon never served, and that he could never have 
brought himself to submit to the authority of a parliament 
or a king, any more than Alexander could have obeyed the 



76 



THE EMPIRE. 



confederation of the Greeks, or Cscsar the orders of the Ro- 
man Senate. 

To wish that Alexander, Coesar, and Napoleon had not 
been masters, in what place or time soever they might have 
lived, were to forget, were to misapprehend their nature, 
their genius and destiny. The son of the Macedonian, the 
pupil of Aristotle, led captive by his eloquence as well as 
his triumphs, the imaginations of the Greeks and of the Bar- 
barians. Csesar swayed the Roman legions by the ascend- 
ant of his eloquence. Napoleon won all at once over the 
old generals of the republic, over his army and the nation, 
the resistless empire of victory and genius. 

We find in the proclamations, bulletins, and orders of the 
day of Napoleon, the qualities of the soldier, the art of the or- 
ator, and the profound and subtle sense of the politician. It 
is not only the language of a general, nor of a king, nor of 
a statesman, it is all these at the same time. If Napoleon 
was a consummate orator, it is that he was a complete man. 
What splendor has not genius united with power ! What 
authority must not the language of this ravager of nations, 
this founder of states, have derived from the majesty of su- 
preme command, the eminence and perpetuity of the gen- 
eralship, the immense number of his troops, their fidelity and 
attachment, the multiplied splendor of his victories, the nov- 
elty, the suddenness, the hardihood, and the extraordinary 
grandeur of his enterprises. Napoleon combined all the- 
conditions of personal boldness, of sovereign power, and of 
political and military talents in the highest degree of any 
commander of modern times, and it is in this that he is with 
them, in all respects, incomparable. 

For the rest, let us not confound the military apothegms 
with the harangues of which we shall speak afterwards. 

Sublime apothegms abound in the warlike annals of all 
countries and all times. " Return alive with thy shield, or 
dead upon it," said a Spartan mother to her son. " Our 
forests of arrows will darken- the sun-light." " So much the 
better," replied Leonidas to Xerxes, " we shall fight in the 



NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 77 

shade." Crcsar stumbles in setting foot on the coast of 
Africa. Instantly, to avert the evil presage, he cries: 
" Africa, I embrace thee !" Henry IV., at Coutras, slipping 
out from amidst his guard : '•' Stand aloof, gentlemen, I pray 
you, do not hide me, I desire to be seen." Villars, expiring, 
laments: " This Berwick has just been cut in twain with'a 
ball ! and I die in my bed ! I always said Berwick would 
have the better fortune !" Larochejaquelin, the Vendean 
general, rushes into the thickest of the battle, saying : " I 
wish to be but a hussar for the pleasure of sharing the fight." 
And this remark of Kleber to Bonaparte: "GeneraCyou 
are great like the world !" And those beautiful words of 
Desaix : " Go say to the First Consul that I die with the re- 
gret of having done too little for posterity !" And these, of 
generals, of captains, of soldiers, and of drummers : " The 
Guard dies, but does not surrender !" " Hither, d'Auvergne, 
it is the enemy !" " I die, but they fly !" " I have a h'knd 
still left to beat the charge !" And a number of others. 

Napoleon too gave utterance to a multitude of military 
apothegms : 

To the Commissioner of the National Convention, at 
Toulon: "Mind your business of representative, and let me 
mind mine of artillerist." To the troops who were giving 
ground on the terrible bridge of Areola: "Onward! follow 
your general!" To his soldiers in Egypt: "Forty ao-es 
look down upon you from the height of yonder pyramids !" 
To the plenipotentiaries at Leoben : " The French Republic 
is like the sun. Blind are those who do not see it !" To 
the army at Marengo : " Soldiers, remember it is my habit 
to sleep on the field of battle !" To his soldiers of artillery, 
revolted at Turin : " This flag, which you have deserted' 
will be hung up in the temple of Mars and enveloped in 
mourning. Your corps is disbanded." To the fourth regi- 
ment of the line : " What have you done with your eagle? 
A regiment which has lost its eagle, has lost its all !" " Yes, 
but here are two standards we have taken from the enemy."' 
" Very good," said he, smiling, " I will give you back your 



78 T TI E E M P 1 R E . 

eagle!" To General Morcau, on presenting him a pair of 
pistols, richly mounted : " I designed to Iiavo them engraved 
with the names of all your victories. But there was not room 
enough to contain them." To a grenadier, surprised hy 
sleep, and whose guard Napoleon was mounting : " After 
so much fatigue, it may be well permitted a brave fellow 
like you to fall asleep." To a soldier who was excusing 
himself for having, against orders, let General Tourbert enter 
his tent : " Go, he who forced the Tyrol, may well force a 
sentinel." To a Court general, who solicited him for a mar- 
shal's staff: "It is not I who make the marshals, it is vic- 
tory." To a Russian commandant of artillery at Austerlitz, 
v/ho said to him : " Sire, have me shot ! I have lost my 
pieces." " Young man, console yourself! it is possible to be 
beaten by my army, and have still some titles to glory." 
To his army on opening the Russian campaign : " Soldiers, 
Russia is hurried along by fate ; let her destinies be accom- 
plished." On beholding, the morning of the battle of Mos- 
cow, the sun rise cloudless: "It is the sun of Austerlitz!" 
To his grenadiers who were alarmed on seeing him point 
the cannon at Montereir : " Come, my friends, fear nothing, 
the ball to kill me is not yet cast." At Grenoble, on his 
return from the Isle of Elba, in presence of a regiment who 
hesitated, he leaped off his horse, and uncovering his breast : 
" If tliere be one amongst you, if there be a single individ- 
ual who wishes to kill his general, his Emperor, he can do 
so : here 1 am !" 

But it is in his military harangues especially that we dis- 
cover Napoleon. He became at once an orator, as he did a 
general. What astonishes particularly in so young a man, 
is the fertility, the soupleness, the discernment of his genius. 
He knov.'s what to say, what to do, what to be to all, on 
every occasion. No one has taught it to him, and yet he 
knows it all. Towards the Pope he is perfectly respectful, 
while capturing his cities. Prince Charles lie treats with 
the loftiness of an equal and the courtesy of a knight. He 
-enjoins discipline, he honors artists and learned men, he 



NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 79 

protects religion, property, women, and aged persons. He 
posts sentinels at the gates of the churches. He sends 
Soult every Sunday to mass, with his stafF. In Egypt, he 
will wear the turban, if necessary, and recite the Koran. 
He regulates provision markets, re-establishes communica- 
tions, organizes a system of administrative accountability, 
institutes civil municipalities and provisional governments. 
Scarce has he conquered a territory, than he has it under 
the full operation of a government. It is not in the name 
of the Directory that he treats with other powers, but in the 
name of Bonaparte. From the outset, he demeans himself 
not as general-in-chief of the army, but as master. The old 
generals tremble in presence of this boyish warrior. They 
cannot bear those curt expressions which interrogate them, 
that look that pierces them through, that will that subjugates 
them. They feel themselves at the same time attracted and 
repressed. They take the positions assigned them, they ad- 
mire in silence, they obey, and with them the rest of the 
army. 

There is nothing like his manner of haranguing in 
modern or in ancient times. He speaks as if he stood, not 
on a hillock, but on a mountain. One would imagine he 
was himself a hundred cubits high. He does not confine 
his attention to the enemies he is going to fight, nor to the 
places which he traverses at a running pace. He makes a 
survey of Europe and of the globe. His army is not a 
simple army, it is the Grand Army. His nation is not a 
simple nation, it is the Great Nation. He erases empires 
from the map. He seals the new kingdoms which he insti- 
tutes, mth the pommel of his sword. He pronounces upon 
dynasties, amid the thunder and lightning of battle, the 
decrees of fate. 

The figurative language of Napoleon would be ill re- 
ceived at this day, and would border upon the ridiculous. 
We care no more for the pomp of war. We have other 
wants, other ideas, other prejudices perhaps. But at that 
time the general imagination was in a state of excitement. 



80 



THE F, ^r P I R E . 



ft was immediately after a revolution wliich had destroyed 
everything, renewed everything. It was a period of wild 
adventure and of vague speculation. 

This was the time for Napoleon, as Napoleon was the 
man for this time. — Scarce has he relieved Scherer and 
taken the command of the army of Italy, than he rushes 
upon the enemy and at once bears off the victory. What 
imagination, what vigor, what confidence, what tone of con- 
queror and master in the following proclamation of a general 
of twenty-six years old : 

" Soldiers, you have, in fifteen days, gained six victories, 
' taken twenty-one stand of colors, fifty pieces of cannon, 
several fortified places, made fifteen hundred prisoners, and 
killed or wounded over ten thousand men. You are the 
equals of the conquerors of Holland and of the Rhine. 
Destitute of everything, you have supplied yourselves with 
everything. You have won battles without cannon, crossed 
rivers without bridges, made forced marches without shoes, 
bivouacked without spiritous liquor and often without bread. 
The republican phalanxes, the soldiers of liberty were alone 
capable of enduring what you have suffered. Thanks to 
you, soldiers ! your country has a right to expect of you 
great things. You have still battles to fight, cities to take, 
rivers to pass. Is there one amongst you whose courage 
flags ? One, who would prefer, returning to the steril 
summits of the Apennines and the Alps, to undergo patiently 
the insults of that slavish soldiery ? No, there is not one 
such among the victors of Montenotte, of Millesimo, of Diego 
and of Mondovi ! 

"Friends, I promise you that glorious conquests but be 
the liberators of peoples, be not their scourges !" 

The effect of this discourse upon the army was electrical, 
and Napoleon did but march from triumph to triumph, in 
his immortal campaign of .Italy. He enters Milan, and 
.there, to sustain, to fan still higher the courage of his sol- 
diers, he says to them : 

" You have rushed like a torrent from the height of the 



NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 61 

Apennines. Piedmont is delivered. Milan is yours. Your 
banner floats throughout entire Lombardy. You have 
crossed the Po, the Tessino, the Adda, those much-vaunted 
bulwarks of Italy. Your fathers, your mothers, your 
wives, your sisters, your lovers rejoice at your triumphs, 
and are proud of their connection with you. Yes, soldiers ! 
you have done much, but is there nothing for you still to 
do? Will posterity have to reproach you with having 
found a Capua in- Lombardy ? Let us on ! We have yet 
forced marches to perform, enemies to subdue, laurels to 
gather, wrongs to avenge ! 

" To reinstate the Capitol and the statues of its heroes ; 
to awake the Roman people from the lethargy of ages of 
enslavement — this is what remains for us to accomplish ! 

" You will then return to your homes, and yo.ur fellow, 
citizens, pointing you out to one another will say : He was 
of the army of Italy !" 

Never before had French soldiers been addressed in such 
language. They were infatuated with him. He might 
have led them to the extremities of the earth. This was 
what he already was dreaming of, and this vision of his 
imagination he transfused into their souls. 

Accordingly, mark how he addresses his companions of 
Italy, when now out at sea, lie was sailing towards Malta, 
and half disclosed to them the secret of the expedition to 
Egypt : 

"Soldiers, you are a wing of the army of England ! 
You are masters of the modes of warfare appropriate to moun- 
tains, to plains, to sieges. Naval war remains to com- 
plete your experience. The Roman legions whom you 
have sometimes imitated, but not as yet equalled, fought 
Carthage successively upon this sea and upon the plains of 
Zama. Victory never forsook them, because they were 
constantly brave, patient of fatigue, well disciplined, reso- 
lute. But, soldiers, Europe has her eyes upon you ! You 
have great destinies to fulfil, battles to fight, fatigues to sur- 
mount !" 



82 T II E E M P I R E . 

And when, from the top-mast, the fleet descries the coast 
of Alexandria, Bonaparte discovering openly his designs : 

" Frenchmen, you are about to undertake a conquest of 
which the effects upon the civilization and commerce of the 
world are incalculable. The first city you are to meet v/as 
founded by Alexander." 

According as he penetrates with his army the sands of 
Egypt, he perceives that he has to do with a fanatical people, 
ignorant and vindictive, who distrust the Christians, but who 
detest still more the insults, the extortions, the pride and ty- 
ranny of the Mamelukes. To flatter tliese, their animosities 
and prejudices, he addresses them a proclamation quite in 
the Turkish style : 

" Cadis, Sheiks, Imans, Chorbadgys, you will be told that 
I came to destroy your religion ; do not believe it. Let 
your answer be that I come to re-establish your rights and 
punish your usurpers, and that I have more respect than the 
Mamelukes, for your God, his prophet and the Koran. 

" Tell your people that all men are equal before God. 
Wisdom, talent and virtue make the only difference be- 
tween them. 

" But, is there a fine country ? it is appropriated by the 
Mamelukes. Is there a beautiful slave, a fine horse, a fine 
house ? all this belongs to the Mamelukes. If Egypt be their 
farm, let them show the lease which God has given them of it ! 
But God is just and merciful to the people. The Egyptians 
will be called to fill the public stations. Let the wisest, the 
most enlightened, the most virtuous govern, and the people 
will be happy. 

" You had formerly large cities, great canals, a flourish- 
ing commerce. What has ruined them all, if not the ava- 
rice, the injustice, and the tyranny of the Mamelukes? 

" Cadis, Sheiks, Imans, Chorbadgys, tell the people that 
we too are true Mussulmans. Is it not we who demolished 
the Pope, the great enemy of the Mussulmans ? Are we not 
the friends of the Grand Seignor ? 

" Jhrice happy those who shall be found on our side ! They 



NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 83 

will prosper in fortune and rank. Happy those who shall 
remain neutral ! They will have time to know the result, 
and then will join us. 

" But woe, eternal woe to those who take arms in fa- 
vor of the Mamelukes and fight against us ! There will be 
no hope for them ; they will perish !" 

After the revolt of Cairo, he avails himself of the conster- 
nation and the credulity of the Egyptians, to present him- 
self to them in the character of a supernatural being, an 
emissary of God, the inevitable man of destiny. 

" Sheiks, Ulemans, believers of Mahomet, make known 
to the people that those who have been enemies to me, will 
find no refuge either in this world or the other. Is there 
a man so blind as not to see that Destiny itself directs my 
operations?" 

" Inform the people, that since the beginning of time it 
was written that after having overthrown the enemies of 
Islamism, demolished the Cross, I would come from the far 
West to fulfil the task which has been assigned me. Show 
the people that in the holy book of the Koran, in more than 
twenty passages, what now happens has been foretold, and 
what is to happen is equally explained. 

" / would bring every one of you to account for the most 
secret sentiments of his heart. For I know them all, even 
those which you have told to no one. But the day will come 
when all will see manifestly that / am under the conduct of 
superior guidance, and that all efforts can be of no avail 
against me." 

On the 18th Brumaire, surrounded by his brilliant staff, 
Napoleon apostrophized the Directory with the haughty au- 
thority of a master demanding the accounts of his stewards, 
and as if he had been already the sovereign of France : 

" What have you done with that France which I had left 
you so flourishing ? I had left you peace, I find war. I 
had left you the millions of Italy, I find everywhere plun- 
derinsT laws and destitution What has become of 



84 T HE E M P I R E . 

a hundred thousand Frenchmen, whom I knew my com- 
panions in glory and labor ? Tlioy are dead !" 

The morning of the famous battle of Austerlitz, he vividly 
initiates his army into the inspirations of his strategy : 

" The Russians mean to turn my right, and will present 
me their flank. 

" Soldiers, I will direct myself all your battalions. I will 
keep away from the firing, if, with your v/onted bravery, 
you carry disorder and confusion into the enemy's ranks. 
But, if the victory should be for a moment doubtful, you will 
see me rush to fall in the front of the conflict. Then is all 
over with the honor of the French infantry, the first in the 
world. This victory will end your campaign. Then the 
peace which I will make will be worthy of France, of you, 
and of me !" 

What grandeur in these last words ! 

His discourse after the battle is a master-piece of military 
eloquence. He is pleased with his sol'diers. He goes 
among them. He reminds them what they have overcome, 
what they have achieved, what will be said of them. Not a 
word of the chiefs. The Emperor and the soldiers, France 
in the perspective, peace for their recompense, glory for 
their reminiscence. What an opening, and what an 
ending ! 

" Soldiers, I am pleased with you ; you have decorated 
your eagles with immortal glory. An army a hundred 
thousand strong, commanded by the Emperors of Russia 
and of Austria, has been, in less than four hours, either cut 
to pieces or dispersed ; such as have escaped your sword 
are drowned in the marshes. 

" Forty stand of colors, the banners of the imperial guard 
of Russia, one hundred and twenty pieces of cannon, twenty 
generals, over thirty thousand prisoners, are the result of' 
this day, for ever memorable. That "infantry, so much 
vaunted and superior in numbers, has not been able to with- 
stand your shock, and henceforth you have no rivals to 
3 re ad. 



NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 85 

" Soldiers, when the French people placed upon my head 
the imperial crown, I relied upon you to maintain it ever in 
that eminence of glory which alone could give it value in 
my eyes. Soldiers, I will soon lead you back to France. 
There, you vwll be the object of my tenderest solicitude ; 
and it will suffice to say : I fought at Austerlitz, when the 
reply will be, ' There goes a hero !' '' 

On the anniversary of this battle, he recapitulates com- 
placently the accumulated spoils which fell into the hands 
of the French, and inflames their ardor against the Russians 
by the remembrance of the victory. " They and we, are 
we not the soldiers of Austerlitz V — This is the stroke of a 
master hand. 

" Soldiers, it is this day a year ago, at this very hour, 
that we were upon the memorable plain of Austerlitz.- The 
Russian battalions fled appalled. Their allies are no more. 
Their fortresses, their capitals, their magazines, their arse- 
nals, two hundred and eighty stand of colors, seven hundred 
field-pieces, five grand strongholds are in our power. The 
Oder, the Wasta, the Polish deserts, the inclement weather, 
nothing has been able to arrest your course, — all have fled 
before you. The French eagle hovers over the Vistula. 
The brave and unfortunate Poles imagine they behold again 
the legions of Sobieski. 

'' Soldiers, we shall not lay down our arms until a general 
peace has restored to our commerce its freedom and its 
colonies. We have conquered on the Elba and the Oder, 
Pondicherry, our Indian establishments, the Cape of Good 
Hope, and the Spanish colonies. Who should give the Rus- 
sians the hope of balancing the destinies ? Are not ihey 
and we the soldiers of Austerlitz ?" 

He opens the Prussian campaign by these words, which 
glow like powder at the instant of explosion : 

" Soldiers, I am in the midst of you ; you are the van- 
guard of the great people. You should re-enter- France, 
but under triumphal arches. What ! you would then have 
braved the seasons, the seas, the deserts, vanquished Europe 

8 



86 THEEMPIRE. 

several times coalesced against you, borne our glory from 
the east to the west, but to return to-day to your country 
like deserters, and hear it said that the French eagle f^d 
dismayed at the sight of the Prussian armies? 

" March we then, since your moderation has failed to dis- 
abuse them of tliat strange infatuation. Let them learn that 
if it be easy to obtain an increase of power by the friendship 
of the great people, its enmity is more terrible than the tem- 
pests of the ocean !" 

In 1609, about to punish Austria for her repeated per- 
fidies. Napoleon confides to the army his great designs; he 
mixes it, he associates it, with his own vengeance. He does 
not separate himself from it ; the cause is its own, which he 
goes to defend. What a flight of military eloquence in this 
address ! 

" Soldiers, I was surrounded by you when the sovereign 
of Austria came to my tent in Moravia. You heard him 
implore my clemency, and vow to me an eternal friendship. 
Victors of three wars, Austria owes everything to your 
generosity. Three times has she been guilty of perjury ! 
Our past successes are assurances to you of the victory 
which awaits us. Let us march then, and at sight of us let 
the enemy recognize his conquerors !" 

With the same ardor, he animates against the English the 
expedition to Naples. His words seem winged. 

"Soldiers, march, hurl into the waves — should they wait 
for you — the impotent battalions of those tyrants of the seas ! 
Let me quickly hear that the sanctity of treaties is avenged, 
and that the manes of my brave soldiers — butchered in the 
ports of Sicily, on their return from Egypt, after having es- 
caped all the perils of shipwrecks, of deserts, and of a hun- 
dred battles — are appeased." 

It is still to beat down the power of his implacable, of his 
eternal foe, that he harangues the army of Germany, on his 
return, and opens before its view the conquest of Iberia: 

"Soldiers, after having triumphed on the banks of the 
Danube and the Vistula, you have traversed Germany by 



NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 87 

forced marches. You are now to cross France, without 
getting a moment's repose. Soldiers, I need your aid. The 
hideous presence of the leopard infests the continents of Spain 
and Portugal. Let him, at sight of you, fly in affright. Let 
us waft our victorious eagles as far as the Columns of Her- 
cules : there too have we outrages to revenge ! Soldiers, 
you have surpassed the renown of modern armies ; but have 
you equalled the glory of the armies of Rome, who, in the 
same campaign, triumphed on the Rhine and the Euphrates, 
in Illyria and on the Tagus ?" 

The morning of the battle of Moscow, he displays to the 
eyes of his soldiers the new harvest of laurels to be gath- 
ered, and places them, with himself, in presence of their 
reminiscences and of posterity : 

" Here is the battle which you have so much desired ! 
Henceforth, victory depends upon yourselves ; it is become 
a necessity to you. It will give you plenty, good winter- 
quarters, and an early return home. Conduct yourselves 
as at Austerlitz, at Friedland, at Witepsk, at Smolensk, and 
let the latest posterity cite with pride what you shall have 
performed this day. Be it said of you, he was at the great 
battle under the walls of Moscow !" 

We have reached, with the sun, the summit of the moun- 
tain. We must descend into the shade : let us pause a moment. 

Glory goes out after its day is spent : liberty alone repairs 
itself by its very exhaustion. The more it is diffused, the 
more is it prolific. But Napoleon was unwilling to throw 
himself into the arms of liberty. Perhaps — I say perhaps-^ 
by putting himself at the head of the European democracy, 
he would have subverted, more effectually than with his 
armies, the thrones of Europe. This he would not do. 
How could he, — he, equally, nay, more a despot than the 
other potentates ? Too upstart for the kings, too aristocratic 
already for the people. Napoleon had soon against him both 
the people and the kings. He had stricken terror into the 
dynasties. The dynasties excited the nationalities to revolt. 
But, an army may be triumphed over ; there is no triumph- 



88 T II E E M P I R E . 

ing over a nation, over several nations. Genius and victory 
cannot avail in tlie end against the independence of a people, 
against the conjunction of" right and number. It is the law 
of humanity, a just and moral, a providential law. Napo- 
leon was then to perish, and his fall was marked almost to 
a fixed hour. 

It is sad to see that empire of gold and purple torn to 
pieces, that vast monarchy cracking in its ill-jointed planks, 
from Rome to Texel, from Hamburg to the Alps ; those ne- 
gotiations twenty times resumed, and as often abandoned ; 
those desperate resistances of the hero, those tempests of his 
struggling soul, those gleams of victory shining through the 
night, those unspeakable treacheries, that defection of cour- 
age in his friends, those secret bargains of sated avarice and 
vanity, those invincible inclinations to repose, that universal 
lassitude of France, now broken down and disheartened. ■ 

Pass we, pass we quickly to the court of Fontainebleau, 
to listen to the farewell of Napoleon to the faithful remnant 
of his army ; to those soldiers who could not tear themselves 
from their general, and who wept around him. There is 
not, in all antiquity, a scene at once more heart-rending 
and sublime. 

" Soldiers, I bid you farewell. For twenty years that we 
have been together, your conduct has left me nothing to de- 
sire. I have always found you on the road to glory. All 
the powers of Europe have combined in arms against me. 
A few of my generals have proved untrue to their duty and 
to France. France herself has desired other destinies ; with 
you and the brave men who still are faithful, I might have 
carried on a civil war ; but France would be unhappy. Be 
faithful, then, to your new king; be obedient to your new 
commanders, and desert not our beloved country. Do not 
lament my lot ; I will be happy when I shall know that you 
are so. I might have died ; if I consent to live, it is still to 
promote your glory. I will write the great things that we 
have achieved. ... I cannot embrace you all, but I embrace 
your general. Come, General Petit, that I may press you 



N A r O L E O N D O N A P A R T E . 89 

to my Iieart ! Bring me the eagle ! that I may embrace it 
also ! Ah I dear eagle, may this kiss which I give thee find 
an echo to tlie latest posterity! Adieu, my children; the 
best wishes of my heart shall be always with you : do not 
iorgct mc !" 

He depar'ts, and from the recesses of the Isle of Elba he 
organizes his fabulous expedition. Before he has landed, 
while still upon that frail skiff which bears Csesar and his 
good fortune, he commits to the waves, he scatters upon the 
winds his proclamation. He wakes before his soldiers' eyes 
the shades of a hundred, and sends his eagles before him 
to herald his triumphant return. 

'' Soldiers, in my exile I have heard your voice. . . . We 
have not been vanquished .... but betrayed ; we ought to 
forget that we were the masters of nations, but we ought 
not to suffer that any of them should intermeddle in our af- 
fairs. Who dare pretend to be master over us ? Resume 
those eagles which you bore at Ulm, at Austerlitz, at Jena, 
at Montmirail ! The veterans of the army of Sambre-et- 
Meuse, of the Rhine, of Italy, of Egypt, of the West, of the 

Grand Army, are humbled Come, range yourselves 

under the banners of your chief. .... Victory will march 

at a charging pace The eagle, with its national colors, 

will fly from steeple to steeple, till it alights on the towers of 
Notre-Dame !...." 

On the next day after his arrival at the Tuilleries, and 
amid the astonishment of the public mind, which succeeded a 
night of enthusiasm and intoxication, he rallies the old Guard 
around his banner. He presents to them his brave com- 
panions of Elba. What gradation, what art, what propri- 
ety, what oratorical ability in this effusion ! 

"Soldiers, behold the officers of battalion who have ac- 
companied me in my misfortune : they are all my friends ; 
they are dear to my heart. Every time I saw them, they 
represented to me the several regiments of the army. 
Amonn- these six hundred brave men, there are soldiers of 
every regiment ; all brought me back those great days whose 



90 T H E E M P I R E . 

momory is so dear to me ; for all were covered with honorable 
scars received in those memorable battles. In loving them, 
it is you all, soldiers of the French army, that I loved. . . . 
They bring you back these eagles ; let them be your rally- 
ing-point; in giving them to the Guard, I give them to the 
whole army ; treachery and untoward circumstances had 
wrapped tliem in a shroud ; but, thanks to the French peo- 
ple and to you, they reappear resplendent in all their glory. 
Swear that they shall always be found when and wherever 
the interest of the country may call them ! Let the traitors 
and those who would invade our territory, be never able to 
endure their gaze." 

It would be too long to unfold all the beauties of situation 
of this piece. 

Some days after, in the Champ-de-Mars, he speaks no 
more of the glory of battles and the devotion of his compan- 
ions ; he flatters, exalts, caresses, before the people and the 
Legislative Body, the great sentiment of the national sover- 
eignty. 

" Emperor, Consul, Soldier, I owe all to the people! In 
prosperity, in adversity, on the battle-field, in the council, on 
the throne, in exile, France has been the sole and constant 
object of my thoughts and actions. Like that King of Ath- 
ens, I have sacrificed myself for my people, in the hope of 
seeing realized the promise made to preserve to France her 
natural integrity, her honor and her rights " 

Subsequently, he conjures the Chambers to forget their 
quarrels in presence of the greatness of the national dan- 
ger. These words have been retained : 

" Let us not follow the example of the Lower Empire, 
which, pressed on every side by the Barbarians, has made 
itself the laughing-stock of posterity, by wasting its time 
upon abstract discussions, at the moment the battering-ram 

was shattering the gates of the city It is in times of 

difficulty that the great nations, like the great men, display 
all the energy of their character." 

When all is over, when he is stricken by the thunderbolt 



NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 91 

of Waterloo, how touching are his last words to the army ! 
How ho effaces himself! how he hides himself from his own 
eyes ! it is no more to soldiers, but to patriots, to citizens, to 
brothers, that he addresses himself. He names himself no 
more their sovereign or tlieir general ; it is no more the Em- 
peror, it is simple Napoleon, it is their comrade in arms who 
bids them farewell. 

" Soldiers, though absent, I will attend your footsteps ; it 
was the country above all that you served in obeying me, 
and if I have had som€ share in your affection, I owed it to my 
ardent love for France, our common mother. Soldiers, yet 
a few efforts, and the coalition is dissolved. Napoleon will 
recognize you by the blows you strike !" 

But his career was at an end : the Bellerophon stood al- 
ready at anclior in the British Channel. Napoleon went 
aboard witli that confidence, rather naive, of great men in 
adversity. It is on board this vessel that he wrote the Prince 
Reoent this letter so well known and of so much noble sim- 
plicity : 

" Royal Highness, — 

'• A butt to the factions who divide my country and to the 
enmity of the greatest powers of Europe, I have terminated 
my political career, and come, like Themistocles, to sit by 
the fireside of the British people. I place myself under the 
protection of their laws, which I claim from your Royal 
Highness, as the most powerful, the most consistent, and the 
most generous of my enemies !" 

Such was wont to be the conduct, such the language of 
the great citizens of antiquity, when struck down by ostra- 
cism or beaten by the tempests of their country, they went 
to seek from foreigners the hospitality of exile. 

Yet a few words, reader ! we part but regretfully with 
great men living or dead, and I would protract your admi- 
ration of this one to the end. 

In the recesses of that island, his dreary prison, his imagi- 
nation turned back upon the past, revisited Egypt and the 
East, and lit up with the brilliant reminiscences of his youth : 



92 T ir E E M P I R E . 

" It would have been better," he used to say, striking himself 
on the forehead, " had I not left Egypt. Arabia awaits a 
man. With the French in reserve, the Arabs and the 
Egyptians for auxiliaries, I might have made myself master 
of India, and I would to-day beEmperor of the whole East." 

Then, as if liberty, more attractive than the empire of 
the universe, had shed upon his eyes a gleam of new light, 
he would cry : 

" The grand and beautiful truths of the French Revolution 
will endure forever, such is the lustre,- the monuments, the 
wonders which we have woven around them. We have 
washed away their early stains in the waters of glory. 
They will be immortal. Emanating from the tribune, 
cemented by the blood of battles, adorned with the laurels 
of victory, hailed by the acclamations of the people, sanc- 
tioned by treaties, they can never more retrograde. They 
live in Great Britain, they illuminate America, they are 
nationalized in France. Here is the tripod whence will is- 
sue the light of the world !" 

Images of war were ever floating before him in that sick- 
ly state of his mind, dreamy and fluctuating, between waking 
and slumber. 

" Go, my friends, return to Europe, go revisit your fami- 
lies ; for me, I will again see my brave companions in the 
Elysian Plains. Yes, Kleber, Desaix, Bessieres, Duroc, 
Ney, Murat, Massena, Berthier, all will come to meet me ; 
at sight of me, they will be all delirious with enthusiasm 
and glory. We will talk of our wars with the Scipios, the 
Hannibals, the Csesars, the Fredericks ; unless in that re- 
gion," he would say smiling, '' it should excite suspicion to 
see so many warriors together." 

In his frenzy, he would imagine himself at the head of 
the army of Italy. He would hear the drum, and then cry : 
" Steingel, Desaix, Massena— quick, run, take the charge, 
they are ours !" 

Sometimes lie used to talk aloud and all alone, sometimes 
dictate to his secretaries j at others he wrote upon scattered 



NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 93 

leaves the thoughts which burst by bounds, by fragments, 
from his soul too full to contain them. 

" A second Prometheus, I am transfixed upon a rock, 
where a vulture gnaws my vitals. Yes, I have brought 
fire from heaven wherewith to endow France. The fire 
has remounted to its source, and here am I ! The love of 
glory is like that bridge thrown by Satan over chaos, to 
pass from hell to paradise. Glory joins the past to the 
future, from which it is separated by an immeasurable 
abyss. Nothing to my son — nothing save my name !" 

In his accesses of melancholy, he believed and used to 
say, that he was repulsed alive and dead from the land of 
Europe. " Let me be buried under the willows by yonder 
spring, whose water is so sweet and limpid." 

But this was not the last wish of his testament, the last 
look cast back upon the absent country, the last sigh ex- 
haled from that great soul. 

" I desire that my ashes repose on the banks of the Seine, 
in the midst of that people whom I have so much loved !" 

This was the inscription, the sole inscription which should 
have been placed upon the flying streamers of the vessel 
which conveyed his remains, upon the pedestals of the 
columns and on the frontispiece of the triumphal arches 
which lined the way, upon the violet hangings of the funeral 
car, upon the eighty-six banners of the departments, upon 
the porch of the Invalides and upon his tombstone. 

The more this tomb retreats into the shade of time, the 
more radiant will it be with glory to the eyes of posterity. 
Extraordinary men are like mountains, and their image 
seems to grow in proportion as they recede from our view, 
and stand out alone in the confines of. the horizon. 

But let us try to overcome the illusion of that deceitful 
perspective, and try to see Napoleon as he will be seen by 
the sages of posterity. 

As Statesman, he had at once too much genius and too 
much ambition to consent to lay down the supreme authority, 



94 THEEMPIRE. 

and to reign under any master whatever — Parliament, 
People, or King. 

As a Warrior, he lost the throne, not because he did not 
restore legitimacy, or because he stifled liberty, but because 
he was beaten in war. He was not, he could not have 
been a Monk or a Washington, for the very simple reason 
that he was Napoleon. 

He has reigned as reign all the powers of this world, by 
the force of his principle. He has fallen as fall all the 
powers of this world, by violence and the abuse of that 
principle. Greater than Alexander, than Charlemagne, 
than Peter, and than Frederick, he has, like them, im- 
pressed his name upon his age. Like them, he was a law- 
giver. Like them, he founded an empire. His universal 
memory lives beneath the tents of the Arab, and traverses, 
with the canoes of the savage, the distant rivers of the Oceanic 
Islands. The people of France, so ready to forget, of a 
revolution which has overturned the world have retained 
but this name. The soldiers in their bivouac talk of no 
other captain, and when they pass through the cities their 
eyes rest upon no other image. 

When the people accomplished the Revolution of July, 
the banner, all trampled in the dust, which was raised anew 
by the soldier- workingmen, extempore chiefs of the insurrec- 
tion — this banner was the banner surmounted with the, 
French eagle ; it was the banner of Austerlitz, of Jena and of 
Wagram, rather than that of Jemappes and of Fleurus ; it 
was the banner which was planted on the towers of Lisbon, 
of Vienna, of Berlin, of Rome, of Moscow, rather than that 
which floated above the federacy of the Champ-de-Mars ; 
it was the banner which had been riddled with balls at 
Waterloo ; it was the banner which the emperor held em- 
braced at Fontainebleau while bidding farewell to his old 
guard ; it was the banner which shaded at St. Helena the 
face of the expiring hero : it was, in one word, to say all, 
the banner of Napoleon ! 

But stop : for on the other hand I hear muttering already 



NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 95 

a severer voice, and fear that history, in her turn, prepares 
her indictment against him, and changes : 

" He dethroned the sovereignty of the people. He was 
Emperor of the French republic, and he became despot. 
He threw the weight of his sword into the scales of the law. 
He incarcerated individual liberty in the slate prisons. He 
stifled the freedom of 'the press under the gag of the censor- 
ship. He violated the trial by jury. He held in abase- 
ment and servitude the Courts, tiie Legislative Body, and 
the Senate. He depopulated the fields and workshops. He 
grafted upon miUtarism a new nobility, which could not fail 
to become more insupportable than the ancient, because 
without the same antiquity, or the same prestiges. He levied 
arbitrary taxes. He meant there should be throughout the 
whole empire but one voice, his voice, but one law, his will. 
Our Capitols, our cities, our armies, our fleets, our palaces, our 
museums, our magistrates, our citizens, became his capitols, 
his towns, his armies, his fleets, his palaces, his museums, 
his magistrates, and his subjects. He drew after him the 
nation over the battle-fields of Europe, where we have left 
no other remembrance than the insolence of our victories, 
our carcasses, and our gold. In fine, after having be- 
sieged the forts of Cadiz, after having held the keys of Lisbon 
and of Madrid, of Vienna and of Berlin, of Naples and of 
Rome ; after having shaken the very pavements of Moscow 
beneath the thunder of his cannonading, lie has rendered 
France less great than he found her — all bleeding of her 
wounds, dismantled, exposed, impoverished, and humbled." 

Ah ! if I have too ardently, perhaps, admired this extra- 
ordinary man, who has done my country so much good and so 
much evil, whose memory will be eternally glorified in the 
workshops and by the cottage fireside, and whose popular 
name was blended, in my imagination, with all the prosperi- 
ties and all the hopes of the country ; — if the pride of his 
conquests has tickled too much my heart, — if the rays of his 
glory have too much fascinated my youthful gaze, — from 



96 T H E E M P 1 II E . 

the mompnt, O Liberty, that I have come to know thee, 
from the moment thy pure effulgence has shed light upon 
my soul, it is thee that I have followed, thee from whom my 
^arms, now entwining thee, can never more be dissevered, — 
thee, Liberty, sole passion of the generous heart, sole treasure 
worthy of being coveted ! — thee, that preferrest, to men who 
pass away, principles which are eternal, and to the brutali- 
ties of force the victories of intellect, — ihee, who art the mo- 
ther of order, though thy calumniators would coif thee in the 
honnet-rouge of anarchy, — thee, who boldest all citizens to 
be equals and all men to be brothers, — thee, who dost recog- 
nize no legal superiority but that of responsible magistrates, 
no moral superiority but that of virtue, — thee, who seest 
pass before thee the stormy flight of absolute empires, like 
those clouds that dim a moment the purity of a serene hea- 
ven, — thee, who gleamest across the bars of the political 
prisoner, — thee, who art the midnight meditation of the 
sage, — ^thee, whom the slave invokes in his chains, — thee, 
whom the very tombs seem solemnly to sigh for, — thee, 
who, in the guise of a travelling workman, wilt make the 
tour of Europe, to stir up the cities and kingdoms by the 
force and the fascination of thy tongue, — thee, who wilt one 
day see disappear before thy triumphal march, custom- 
house barriers, secret tribunals, prisoners of state, capital 
punishments, aristocracies, close corporations, standing 
armies, censorships, and monopolies, — thee, who, in a holy 
alliance, wilt confederate the nations differing in language 
and manners, in the name of a common interest, in the name 
of their independence, their dignity, their civilization, their 
tranquillity and their happiness, — thee, who despisest idle 
conquests and false greatnesses, and who hast not descended 
from heaven upon the earth to oppress, but to redeem and 
embellish it, — thee, who art the life of commerce and the 
inspiration of the fine arts, — thee, who canst be served but 
with disinterestedness, who canst be loved but with rapture, 



NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 97 

— thee, who art the first aspiration of youth, who art the 
sublime invocation of old age,--thee. Liberty, who, after 
having broken their chains, wilt conduct the last slaves, with 
palm-branches in hand amid hymns of glory, at the latest 
funeral of Despotism. 

9 



THE RESTOKATIUN. 



It was by no means without eclat that epoch of our po- 
litical life, when liberty, so long compressed beneath the hand 
of a despot, raised aloft her head, when France awoke to ac- 
cents hitherto unknown, when parliamentary Eloquence un- 
bound her tongue and spoke, when every interest, every 
passion, every hope seemed to have met around the tribune, 
there to dispute the possession of the present and the domina- 
tion of the future. 

The Empire, struck down in the person of its chief, had 
still some life in the remembrances of the old soldiers. 
France must always have some passion or other. Liberty 
had succeeded to glory. The emigrants were dreaming of 
Louis XV., the military men of Napoleon, the young men, 
of the Revolution. The people thronged around the Forum. 
It was something to be then a deputy ! It was much more 
than an orator ! At the present day, we still hear spoken 
the same tongue. The president is seated on the same 
gilded chair. The same cariatides still support the same 
tribune ; but the people crowd no more upon the steps and 
in the porches of the temple. They no longer put faith in 
the oracles of representative government. The season is 
cold, night approaches, the sun goes down the horizon, and 
its paleing beams cease to illumine the world. 

Three political schools disputed the ground of the Resto- 
ration : The English school, the Legitimist school, and the 
Liberal school. 

M. de Serre was 'the orator of the English school, of 
which Royer-Collard was the philosopher. They had both, 



THE RESTORATION. ^9 

for principle, the sovereignty of reason ; for means, the 
hierarchy of powers ; for end, the parliamentary monarchy. 
Around these, moved CamilleJordan, who bathed with 
unction his mellifluent phrase ;^Pasquier, whose quick- 
silvery argumentation escaped all analysis and refutation ; 
— Saint- Aulaire, who tossed off his words with the negligent 
and somewhat impertinent grace of an aristocratic supercili- 
ousness ;— Courvoisier, the readiest and most exhaustless of 
talkers, if Thiers had never existed ;— Simeon, a profound 
jurisconsult ;— de Gazes, a minister of marked elegance and 
a charming figure, whose phraseology was not without copi- 
ousness and flexibility, nor his gesture unimposing ; who 
pressed, hurried along by the exigencies of the moment, by 
the phantasies and the fears of the Court, by the flux and 
reflux of a thousand enemies, gave himself up to the drift 
of all sorts of currents ; who muzzled the liberty of the 
press and suspended the reactions of the reign of terror, and 
who, master of his m.aster and of France, blended real' ser- 
vices with great faults, and the prudence of a politician with 
the weaknesses of a courtieur ;— Laine, a statesman, vis- 
ionary, melancholy, dreamy, whose voice moaned forth the 
vague intonations of a harp of Ossian ; a character without 
decision, a hand tremulous and effeminate, which was una- 
ble to hold the reins of power ; but an orator of grave de- 
portment, well-modulated delivery, who had sometimes the 
eloquence of the heart, and who, in compassion for the pro- 
scribed, used to become aflected on the subject of their woes, 
and embrace, in their behalf, with tears and supplications,' 
the altars of mercy and commiseration ;— in fine, Beugnot 
the keenest man of the kingdom of France and Navarre, 
next to M. de Lemonville, who himself was inferior to M. 
de Talleyrand. 

The Legitimist school was divided into two parties : One 
was composed of hot-headed men, who were for pushino- all 
tilings to the absolute, or of men of milder mood, devoted 
to God in heaven, and to the King upon earth. The other 
was composed of men no less true to the faith, but modified 



100 THE RESTORATION. 

by the exercise of power, and who accommodated themselves 
to the Charter as to a necessity more potent than them, and 
than the royalty which had to suffer it. 

At the head of the former phalanx shone M. de la Bour- 
donnaie, who proposed the famous categories and caused the 
expulsion of Manuel. A counter- revolutionist, of the tem- 
per of the ancient Conventionalists ; kept in check by politi- 
cal considerations ; more imperious than able, and whose 
language was not destitute of either vigor or elevation : 
— M. de Lalot, whose fulminating invective overthrew the 
Richelieu ministry ; full of imagery in his style, and of a 
vehement and colored copiousness. 

— M. DuDON, so profoundly versed in the study of adminis- 
trative legislation, whose portly head never bowed before an 
objection, and who received, with the muzzle to his breast, 
the balls of the Opposition, with all the phlegm of an Eng- 
lishman. 

— M. de Castelbajac, who was in a constant flurry on his 
bench, striking with foot and fist, clamoring, exclaiming and 
interrupting the deputies all incredulous of his monarchi- 
cal faith. 

— M. de Bonald, an orator rather misty, a religious philoso- 
pher, counterpart to Royer-Collard, a moral philosopher, 
and unquestionably one of the greatest writers of our times. 
— M. de Salaberry, a warm royalist, a "petulant orator, 
marching pistol in hand to the encounter of the Liberals, 
and pouring upon them, from the heigh^of the tribune, the 
boiling imprecations of his wrath. 

— M. de Marcellus, with whom royalty was not merely a 
principle, but a divinity, and who prostrated himself before 
his idol, with the naive fervor of a pilgrim^ and a knight. 

M. de Villele stood out, like a large figure, on the back- 
ground of this picture. 

Around M. de Villele were seen to group themselves men 
of a very different order of merit ; M. Corbiere, one of the 
most learned jurisconsults of a province where they are all 
learned ; a dabbler in second-hand literature ; a dialectitian 



THE RESTORATION. 101 

caustic and cogent, who puts wings to his shaft, that it might 
fly the quicker to its destination and pierce the deeper his 
adversaries ; — M. de Berbis, an able explorer of the budget, 
a man of lucid intellect and upright conscience ; — M. de 
Peyronet, remarkable for the clarion vibrations of his voice, 
the ingenious adroitness of his logic and the flowery pomp 
of his language ;— M. de Martignac, that melodious orator 
who played upon the vocal instrument, like Tulon upon the 
flute; — M. M. Josse de Beauvoir and Cornet-d'Incourt, 
light-armed scouts detached from the wings of the ministerial 
phalanx to commence the engagement and spy the leaders 
at the head, in the copsewood of the Opposition; — M. Pardes- 
sus, a lucid intellect, an eloq.uent speaker, a profound juris- 
consult ;— M. Ravez, the eagle of the Girondist bar, cele- 
brated for the dignity of his bearing and the simple beauty 
of his voice ; one of those men who command wherever 
they appear and where they speak, the attention of their au- 
ditors ; powerful in his dialectic, learned in his expositions, 
master of his own passions and of those of others, and who, 
had he not been President of the Chamber, might, as orator, 
have swayed the section of the Right. 

The Liberal School was a belligerent school. M. de 
Serre was the first to enter the lists, and after having fired 
his rounds and emptied his knapsack, he intrenched himself 
behind the ramparts of power. Manuel commanded the 
corps of reserve of the Opposition, and General Foy led the 
van. Benjamin Constant attacked the censorship, Lafitte 
the budget, Bignot the diplomacy. D'Argenson launched 
into the air, out of sight, the first rockets of radicalism. 
Casmir-Perier, carried beyond the ranks by the impetuosity 
of his martial ardor, challenged the minister to single com- 
bat. Corcelles, Stanislas, Girardin and Chauvelin, kept 
hovering around their benches and sent him, even in re- 
treating, some effective darts ; and as final consequence of 
this warlike system, it was, after a pitched battle of speeches, 
a mere street fight which defied the monarchy. 

9* 



102 THE RESTORATION. 



M. DE SERRE. 



Louis XVIII. had ascended his throne, and the vessel of 
exile was bearing Napoleon away towards the rock of St. 
Helena. The armies of Europe had sheathed the sword of 
war. They were tranquilly encamped upon our soil, for 
the second time polluted with their presence. But the par- 
ties, for a time repressed by the stupor of invasion, were 
about to renew the strife on the parliamentary arena. 

A little ambition, a little hatred and a little revenge com- 
pose the basis of all victorious parties. How could it be 
expected that the Chamber of 1815, rabidly royalist, should 
not betake itself to the work of reaction ? How expect that 
there would not be a struggle on the part of the Emigration 
against the wrecks of the imperial army, of the province 
against the Court, of the ancient interests against the new, 
of the spirit of locality against the spirit of centralization, 
of property against industry, of royalism against liberalism, 
of the altar and the throne against philosophy and the Rev- 
olution ? This struggle was inevitable, imminent, implaca- 
ble. 

They were men of another age the most of those depu- 
ties of 1815. Wealthy burgesses or petty provincial nobles, 
sequestered in their manors, or in their drawing-rooms, they 
knew the men of the Empire but by the hatred they bore 
them, apd the acts of that reign but by the exorbitance of 
taxation and the annual cupping of the conscription. Full 
at once of the terrors of the Revolution and the prejudices 
of the Emigration, superstitious, unlettered, obstinate, they 
would have a state religion, a monarchy without constitution, 
without peerage and v/ithout judiciary ; but not without pro- 
vincial institutions. The government in the hands of the 
king, the administration of the departments in the hands of 
the wealthy burgesses and the nobility — such was their 



M. DE SERRE. 103 

dream. Men, in other respects, of simple and respectable 
manners, sincere in their legitimist and religious faith, in- 
dependent by the habits of their life, by position of fortune, 
by pride of gentleman, and who had nothing in common with 
the servile and insipid ministerialism of our stockjobbing 
age. 

Kindled by its passions, intoxicated by a triumph as com- 
plete as it was unexpected, a Chamber so constituted might 
be expected to run to great excesses, in the tempestuous and 
bloody career of political reactions ; to far greater than it 
should, no doubt, have wished itself. 

M. de Serre appeared, and it might be said that he came 
just in the nick, and that it was time. The name of the 
king ran over in every speech, in every address, in every 
report. The cry of Vive le Roi t broke forth spontaneously, 
from the agitated Chamber, less however as a cry of love 
than a cry of war. At this exclamation, the enraptured 
majority clapped hands and started up with the transports 
and the dizziness of delirium. Yet another wave, and the 
torrent of reaction had swept down its embankments, rushed 
furiously over the plains and buried France beneath its wa- 
ters. M. de Serre, without hesitation, threw himself intre- 
pidly into the torrent and stopped its course. 

At once soldier and chief, now on the defensive, now on 
the offensive, he multiplied himself and might be said to be 
himself alone almost an army. How many services never 
to be forgotten has he not rendered to the cause of liberty ! 
With what bolts of eloquence did he fulmine against the re- 
establishment of confiscation, against the violences of the 
directoral committees, against the extortions of taxation, 
against the tyranny of prevotal courts, against the infernal 
and secret organization of the spy-system, fraudulent en- 
listments and governmental assassination ! What courage 
amid what dangers ! what elevated reason amid what frantic 
extravagances ! 

The provincial nobility, whether from the jealous leaven 
of that spirit of opposition which, ever since the feudal times. 



104 THE RESTORATION. 

animated it heriditarily against the Courtiers, or that it de- 
sired to concentrate the forces of the aristocracy in the local 
ad;ninistrations, demanded urgently, under a popular pre- 
text, the election by two degrees. M. de Serre baffled this 
stratagem, and carried the direct form of election ; and when 
in 1819, the charge was renewed against this mode of elec- 
tion, de Serre defended it with arguments so convincing and 
an eloquence so captivating that the enthusiasm of his very 
adversaries burst forth in acclamations. 

The oratorical career of M. de Serre was brief, but how 
richly filled up ! What energy of will ! what power of 
reasoning ! what force ! what fulness, what variety in his 
discourses ! what a multitude of combats ! what a succes- 
sion of victories ! How he pleads with ardor against the 
bankruptcy orators who, to annul or reduce the mortgage of 
the public creditors, stigmatized the origin and occasion of 
their titles ! How he puts to shame the denouncers of the 
illustrious Massena ! How he braves the call to order, for 
having opposed the proposition to render the clergy proprie- 
tary, to endow it with a rent-charge in perpetuit)^ of forty- 
two millions, to restore to it the church property remaining 
unsold, to commit to it public instruction of all degrees, as 
also the civil registers, and to recast in the same mould 
the constitution of Church and State ! How he seeks to 
move, where he cannot convince ! How his voice softens, 
how he turns to invoke pity, when there are no ears for 
justice ! 

As minister, M. de Serre continued to march in the path 
of progress. His code of the press was a measure of great 
liberality, a work at that time prodigiously difficult in the 
elaboration of the subject, a production complete in the 
definition of the offences, in the forms of the procedure 
and the articulation of the penalties. M. Guizot, without 
the eloquence and comprehensiveness of de Serre, sustained 
him, however, honorably in that admirable discussion, and 
this noble action of his past life merits him the absolution 
of many a fault. Never, since the establishment of our 



M. DE SERllE. 105 

representative government, in any debate, has any minister 
soared to the same elevation as M. de Serre. He showed 
himself alternately a statesman in the political consideration 
of the subject, a dialectitian in the deduction of the proofs, 
a jurisconsult in the graduation of the penalties, an orator 
in the refutation of his adversaries. Wiser than the attorney- 
generals of the day, he maintained the reference of offences 
of the press to the jury. More liberal than the Opposition 
itself, he combatted the motion of Manuel to extend the in- 
violability to written opinions, and not those pronounced in 
the tribune. How many beautiful and stirring expressions 
dropped at that period from de Serre : '• I do not interdict 
the deputy the right of being a writer." And this : " Lib- 
erty is no less necessary to the moral and, religious, than to 
the political, progression of the people." It was during 
this discussion that de Serre having said that all majorities 
had been sound : " And the Convention too ?" cried M. de 
la Bourdonnaie, — " Yes, sir," rejoined de Serre, " and the 
Convention too, if the Convention had not deliberated with 
the dagger at its breast." 

Oh ! what would be the indignation and pity of de Serre, 
had he the misfortune of living under our regime without 
liberty because it is without principles, without popularity 
because without grandeur ; could he compare the temperate 
legislation of the press, under the king of 1819, — king by 
the grace of God — with the violent legislation of Septem- 
ber, under the king of 1841, king by the grace of the Peo- 
ple ; and if he could see alongside the jury, that liberal ju- 
dicatory of the country, our poor petty ministerial peerage 
pronouncing, upon poor paltry proceedings, its poor pitiful 
decrees. 

Confiscation abashed, crime punished, justice reinstated, 
denunciations stifled, public credit restored, feudalism tram- 
pled down, the elections purified, the right of petition vindi- 
cated, parties equipoised, legislation enlightened, the tribune 
free, the press assured : such were the labors and the re- 
sults of the first and brilliant period of the parliam^^^^'y 



106 THE RESTORATION. 

life of M. de Serre, as deputy, as president of the Chamber, 
and as minister. 

But behold you, all of a sudden, M. de Serre, after hav- 
ing been the most vigorous champion of liberty, constitutes 
himself fatally the liege-servant of power. He attacks 
what he had defended. He burns his idol. He announces 
the approaching tempest ; he utters from the topmast a cry 
of distress, and clings upon the shoals, overhanging the 
gulf whereinto the election law was drawing the monar- 
chy. His energies are wasted, and, to recruit them, he 
leaves a moment the parliamentary scene. Meanwhile, his 
colleague, M. Pasquier, withstood the onset of the Opposi- 
tion, but in retreating. The heavens were gloomy and the 
cloud was about to burst. De Serre is recalled in all haste ; 
he returns, he rushes desperately into the strife. He changes 
the ground of the battle, carries the war with the victory 
into the camp of the Liberals, and saves the monarchy. 

We must be unjust to no man. The Opposition prosecut- 
ed its trade of opposition. Why should not M. de Serre 
prosecute his of minister ? 

The governments, whose basis is not broad and national, 
are sickly bodies, which a dose, a Httle too strong of liberty, 
kills infallibly. M. de Serre was the responsible adviser, 
the political physician, of an infirm royalty. He could not 
kill his patient. But there was then more peril, peril of 
death for the dynasty, in the election laws of 1817, than in 
universal suffrage itself. If desired, I am ready to pnove it. 
But we radicals are inclined too often to judge our adver- 
saries from our point of view, and take it ill, not that they 
do not adopt our principles, but that they act, or that they 
speak according to their own. It is as if a general should 
blame the enemy he attacks, for repulsing him. To judge 
M. de Serre impartially, he must be viewed not from our 
position, but from his. M. de Serre was emigrant, royalist, 
aristocrat, and minister. When there was a reaction of roy- 
alty against liberty, he defended liberty, through liberalism, 
not republicanism. When there was a reaction of liberty 



M. DE SERRE. 107 

against royalty, he defended royalty through loyalty, not 
servility. In both these cases he was quite consistent. The 
character of M. de Serre would permit no half-way meas- 
ures with either his friends or his enemies. Once, with the 
throne at his back, he began to oppose with a lofty and des- 
perate vigor the coalition of parties, the democracy of elec- 
tions, and the menaces of the press. 

M. Pasquier was of an adroit and polished address. That 
of M. de Serre was frank and unceremonious. He dis- 
dained to disguise himself under the artifices of language. 
He went right to the adversary, and dealt him a blow of his 
club. I was present and can imagine I see him still, when 
turning to the Opposition and looking it fixedly between the 
eyes, he said : " I have seen through you, I have penetrated 
your designs, I have unmasked you." The Opposition could 
scarce restrain its fury. " Whatever you may have done 
for the new order of interests," said he on another occasion 
to the deputies of the Extreme Left, " you have not done 
more than I have !" And this was perfectly true. 

The expositions of M. de Serre were at least equal to his 
speeches. What a master touch in this picture of the lib- 
erty of the press in the United States and in England ! 

" Suppose a population complexionally calm and cold, 
scattered over a vast territory, surrounded by the ocean and 
the desert, absorbed in the occupations of agriculture and 
trade, as yet independent of the wants of the intellect and 
the torments of ambition. Divide this population into a 
number of small States more or less democratic, weakly 
constituted, without distinction or rank, and you will com- 
prehend how the licentiousness of the press may there be 
tolerable ; how it may be even a useful instrument of de- 
mocratic government, a stimulant to wrest the individual 
citizens from their domestic concerns, and bring them to the 
discussion of the great interests of the public." 

" Suppose elsewhere a kingdom wherein time has accu- 
mulated upon a haughty aristocracy, influence, dignities, 
riches and possessions almost kingly. It is requisite that 



108 THE RESTORATION. 

there be a check upon the pride of the great ; they must be 
reminded constantly what they owe to the throne and to the 
people ; it must bo inculcated upon them day by day that 
influence can be retained but as it has been acquired, by 
science and courage, by patriotism and public services. 
The newspapers and even theix abuse are admirable for this 
purpose. Add that tiiis aristocracy is not an isolated body 
in the State ; that below it, descending and widening are 
several successive degrees; that these degrees are firmly 
linked, indissolubly welded into one simple hierarchy ; that 
by this all is moved, government, justice civil and criminal, 
administration, police ; then be not astonished that a society 
thus constructed survives the agitation of the periodical 
press." 

M. de Serre had an organizing genius. He was alarmed 
at the dissolvent progress of individualism. He wished, 
like Napoleon, to institute classes, corporations, cities, coun- 
ter-weights, a resisting system of political forces. He was 
not aristocratic by prejudice or caste, by opposition or by 
pride ; but he seemed possessed by the necessity of a hie- 
rarchical discipline, an ascending and descending classifica- 
tion of Chambers, and of society itself. Happily, societies 
do not suffer themselves to be thus shaped by the capricious 
fmger of the legislator. France has the manners of equal- 
ity ; it has a repugnance, quite as much from temperament 
as wisdom, to the stiff and intolerant hierarchies of social 
condition and political power. 

Educated in the school of German philosophy, M. de 
^Serre brought into the discussion of affairs, the processes of 
a method profound without being hollow, ingenious without 
being subtle. He loved to go back to the sources of the 
subject, and he was admirable in his historical expositions. 
He commented learnedly the antinomies of legislation. He 
treated all topics civil, political, military, fiscal, religious, 
with a singular precision of view and great soundness of 
doctrine. Customs, Budget, Registry, Press, personal Lib- 
erty, Petitions, Chamber rules. Elections, Pensions, Public 



M. DE SERRE. 109 

Ini^truction, Council of State, Foreign Affairs, he spoke upon 
all these questions, nor quitted them without marking his 
steps with trains of light. By his manner of stating the di- 
visions of his discourse, in the firmness of his -progressions, 
and the catenation substantial and sustained of his reason- 
ings, you at once recognized the march of a superior mind. 
M. Guizot has a good deal of this manner. 

M. de Serre was tall and meagre of body. He had a 
high and prominent forehead, lank hair, a lively eye, the 
pendant lips and anxious physiognomy of a man of strong 
passions. He stammered in beginning to speak, and you saw 
by the working of his temples that the ideas amassed slowly 
and elaborated themselves with effort in his brain. But by 
little and little they became arranged, they made headway, 
and rolled forth in a compact and marvellous order. He 
plied, he palpitated beneath their weight and flung them 
abroad in magnificent images and expressions picturesque 
and creative. I will mention but a few of these sayings, or 
rather thoughts which escaped him in such vivid abundance. 
— " In proportion as the people unlearn to obey, the minis- 
ter unlearns to govern." 

— " A well-ordered society is the fairest temple that can be 
erected to the Eternal." 

— " Extraordmary tribunals take badly in France." 
— " If ministers abused their power, there would then be no 
difficulty in discovering the laws of responsibility, and the 
modes of impeachment." 

— " Young men of the schools, you have to learn science 
and wisdom, and you affect to guarantee us science and wis- 
dom, and you pretend to judge your masters and the supe- 
riors of your masters !" 

— " If stripped of the moss of age, the roots of all rights 
could be laid bare to the eye, would they be found pure of 
all usurpation, of all stain 7" 

— " Law is the relation of beings to each other; jurispru- 
dence is the expression of those relations." 
« But if by the flash of thought, by the skill of coloring, by 
10 



110 THE RESTORATION. 

the nerve and vehemence of discourse, M. de Serre v^^as the 
most eloquent man of the Restoration ; lie fell occasion- 
ally, like tlie greatest orators, into the natural extravagan- 
cies of a fervid and impetuous delivery. He uttered his 
famous NEVER, which he has been so much reproached for, 
and has sufficiently repented. 

M. de Serre was, during his later years, the target of the 
Opposition. It is against this lofty genius, against this pow- 
erful head (to speak the language of Benjamin Constant) 
that the Opposition directed its shafts. It harassed this 
lion of the ministry. It pulled him by the mane and pierced 
him with its sharpest javelins. It would have wished to be 
able to clip off his claws and confine him in an iron cage. 
Foy, Benjamin Constant, Manuel, Chauvelin, hovered inces- 
santly about this formidable foe, without letting him breathe 
an instant ; and Casimir-Perier, who, become minister, 
could not suffer that he was handled so mildly, and who 
cried with a tone of command to his band of servile depu- 
ties : " Come, come then ! up, gentlemen, up !" permitted 
himself against de Serre the most extraordinary violence of 
gesture and language. 

Were it allowed me to forget that I here draw but an 
oratorical portrait, I would say that M. de Serre was a good 
man, courageous, sincere, upright, adorned with all the do- 
mestic virtues, too tender-hearted perhaps ! The tribune 
wastes rapidly those nervous organizations. General Foy 
was affected in the heart, Casimir-Perier in the liver, and 
de Serre in the brain. This exquisiteness of sensibility gives 
perfection no doubt to the orator, but death to the man. 

After the Court party had used M. de Serre to beat down 
the electoral law, and then the press, he was stripped of the 
seals and the simar and sent into the brilliant exile of an 
embassy, to meditate upon the nothingness of parliamentary 
triumphs. This man, who had been president of the Cham- 
ber, and was the most eloquent of its orators, had not credit 
enough to obtain a re-election as deputy. He was thought 
too royalist by the liberals, and too liberal by the royalists. 



i 



M.DESEllRE. Ill 

Besides, most burgess electors do not like men of intellectual 
superiority. Genius overshadows, and, by a sort of instinct, 
mediocrity assimilates itself. To please the multitude, to 
remain their man, you must make yourself all things to all ; 
not do too much harm nor too much good ; not swim right 
in the current, but drift aside like scum, upon the shore of 
party ; bury your head between your shoulders, squat in a 
corner so as not to see the setting, but so as to hail the ris- 
ing sun ; live the animal life of ministerial dinners and 
Court soirees. Be this, and you will be always deputy !- ¥ 

M. de Serre took violently to heart this his electoral repu- 
diation. He got deranged, and his eyes turned towards that 
tribune of France still resounding with the echoes of his 
eloquence so much regretted, he died. 

Vanity of reputations ! Who has any remembrance to- 
day of M. de Serre ? Vanity of his painter ! Who would 
know but for me, if I had not reproduced his lineaments, 
his physiognomy, his strong and masculine eloquence, if I 
had not thrown him upon the canvass and restored him to 
the light, who would know, in this oblivious age of ours, 
that M. de Serre lived, crushed a civil war, saved the mon- 
archy, was a great orator — so great that, among the princes 
of the modern tribune, he could be compared but to Ber- 
ryer, if Berryer were comparable to any one ! 









112 T U E R E d T U R A T I O N . 



GENERAL FOY. 



The public, at the commencement of the Restoration, 
were but imperfectly acquainted with the full import of the 
Charter of 1814, copied after the English constitution, with 
the metaphysical fiction of its trinity of members, its double 
Chambers, the vain responsibility of its ministers and the 
lying balance of its powers. The Doctrinarians were not 
heard out of the sanctuary of their little chapel. Hatred 
of the foreigner, whose intolerable yoke weighed upon our 
territory, hatred of the aristocracy, who were constantly 
chafing the vanity of the burgess class and menacing the 
new interests established by the Revolution — these v/ere the 
most general sentiments then pervading the nation. 

General Foy made his entrance into the Chambers with 
this twofold hatred at heart. When, mounting for the first 
time the tribune, he dropped this expression : " France has 
still an echo for the words honor and country," the national 
pride was excited, and the tears flowed from the eyes of all 
the old warriors of the Empire. It seemed to them as if 
they had heard a war-cry raised against the foreigner. The 
speeches of Foy owed their extraordinary success to the 
same cause as the songs of Beranger and the pamphlets of 
Poul-Louis Courier. They were all three possessed o? 
exquisite sense, a lively and rare intelligence, and the wants 
of their epoch. They had all the gift of speaking to the peo- 
ple its language of the moment ; for the people, according 
to the period, has more than one tongue at its disposal. 

It was by labor agricultural, industrial, scientific and mil- 



GENERAL FOY. 113 

itary, that the new generation had elevated itself upon the 
ruins of aristocratical idleness. Accordingly, when Gen- 
eral Foy overwhelmed with his sarcasms the gentlemen of 
the Court and the Emigration, entire France was unani- 
mous in applause. It is that Foy, like Poul-Louis, and Be- 
ranger, had touched the fibre of the national heart which 
vibrated most sensitively at the time. He was in unison 
with it. 

After so many lawyer orators, all very nearly cast in the 
same mould, the tribune had at length obtained its military 
orator. The eclat and picquancy of this novelty, with the 
influence of military valor upon all Frenchmen, even un- 
consciously to themselves, made General Foy dear to the 
Opposition, without being disagreeable to the Emigration, not- 
withstanding his attacks. 

Nothing more was needed to encircle General Foy, from 
the moment of his first appearance on the parliamentary 
stage, with that brilliant renown which attended him to the 
grave. But posterity will not ratify the too precipitate judg- 
ment of contemporaries. M. de Serre has been, under the 
Restoration, the eagle of the tribune. Foy is only second to 
him. What in fact is an orator who does not extemporize ? 

The speeches of General Foy do not equal in vigor of 
thought, in imagery of style, in logical connection, in vehe- 
mence, in depth, in point, those of Royer-CoUard and Ben- 
jamin Constant. They are marred by the tinselry of a false 
rhetoric, and are really no better than school-boy amplifica- 
tions in comparison with the famous harangues of Greece 
and Rome. These discourses are moreover confined to the 
narrow circle of a bastard constitutionalism. They are 
just as liberal as the epoch, but do not advance beyond it. 
They do not look enough into the future. They do not suf- 
ficiently take for what they are, for what they are worth, 
the fictions of that absurd representation, the existence of 
which posterity will one day call in doubt ; which limps and 
dislocates itself at every step, and is unable to stand the test 
either of logic or of business. They are stricken with *^^'^ 



114 THE RESTORATION. 

incurable impotence which paralyzes all the orators of our 
monopoly legislatures. They want genius. 

But the profundity of thought, the boldness of speculation, 
the veritude of principles, the beauty of form, the science of 
composition, are appreciated but by a few connoisseurs. 
General Foy had that sort of splendor mixed with the false 
and the true, which was calculated to dazzle the multitude of 
an assembly. Men of intellect themselves, on seeing the 
crowd pass, excited by the common enthusiasm, mingled 
with it and accompanied the triumphal car. But, after the 
procession comes the critic, who calls gold what is gold, 
and tinsel what is tinsel, and who restores men and things 
to their appropriate places. 

A certain person whom no one now reads, has had his 
speeches gilt-edged, printed upon vellum to the number of 
ten thousand copies, and lauded by his panegyrists as equal 
to the orations of Cicero and Demosthenes. To a certain 
other person, or even if you will, to General Foy, a marble 
cenotaph has by subscription been erected, as to the god of 
eloquence. Scarcely could the purse of his friends afford 
to-day to plant over him a wooden cross. 

General Foy had the exterior, the attitude and the ges- 
tures of the orator, a prodigious memory, a clear voice, 
eyes beaming with intellect, and a turn of head which might 
be described as chivalrous. His prominent forehead, tossed 
backward, lightened with enthusiasm, or writhed with 
wrath. He shook the tribune, and had something of the sibyl 
on her tripod. He checked himself, so to say, heroically in 
the impetuosity of argument, and foamed without contortion, I 
had well nigh said, with grace. Frequently he was seen 
to leave all of a sudden his seat, and scale the tribune as if 
he was marching to victory. Mounted, he lauached forth 
his words with an air of command, like another Conde 
hurling his constable's-staff over the redoubts of the enemy. 

General Foy was not accustomed to improvisate his set 
discourses. A man over forty years of age does not learn 
extemporization, any more than swimming, horsemanship, 



GENERAL FOY. " 115 

or music. The tribune has, so to speak, its fingering like 
the piano. The French speech especially, so correct, so 
surcharged with incisives, so interrupted with ablatives, so 
reserved, so prudish, requires to be elaborated and practised 
early. Accordingly the only speakers commonly unprepared 
arc tlie lawyers, or the professors, or the drawing-room 
babblers, those men with woman tongue. To supply the 
deficiency of his oratorical education. General Foy used to 
meditate laboriously his harangues. He could formulize 
and distribute in his capacious memory their whole plan 
and proportions. He disposed his exordiums, classed his 
facts, prepared his theses, and sketched his perorations. 
Then behold him ascend the tribune, and, master of his 
subject, fecundated by study and inspiration, he gave him- 
self up to the current of his thought. His head butts, his 
discourse warms, distends, dilates, takes consistence, form, 
color. He knows what he is going to say, but not how he 
is going to say it. He sees the end, but not by what route 
he is to gain it. He has his hands full of arguments, 
images and flowers, and according as they present them- 
selves, he takes, selects, and assorts them into the garland 
of his eloquence. It is neither the coldness of reading, nor 
the monotonous psalmodizing of recitation. It is a mixed 
procedure, whereby the orator, at once hermit and enthusi- 
ast, improvisator and writer, chains his own frenzy without 
ceasing to be free, forgets and remembers, bursts the thread , 
of his discourse, and knots, but to sunder it again and still 
recover it without the least disconcertion ; blends the sallies, 
the incidents, the surprises, the picturesque of language, 
with reflexion, sequence and thought, and draws his re- 
sources and his power alike from the premeditated and the 
unforeseen, from the vigorous precision of art and the sim- 
ple graces of nature. To be an orator after this fashion is 
not a thing to be had by a wish ; ^for it requires memory, 
invention, originality and taste, the ease of the gentleman 
and the erudition of the scholar — qualities exclusive of each 
other most commonly. 

9* 



116 THE RESTORATION. 

This method of General Foy, and which became perhaps 
but him alone, is not without advantage. In the first place, 
parliamentary assemblies are flattered by the trouble you 
take to please them. Again, the limits of the discourse 
being thus demarcated in advance, the orator is not liable 
to lose himself in the endless space of divagation. He does 
not present himself in slippers and morning-gown on the 
hustings, and keep stringing words together until the idea 
offers, as if the auditors were present for the mere purpose 
of waiting upon you ! 

The most brilliant sayings of General Foy were but 
points kept in reserve, set in framing as it were, for the 
nonce. With what art he could introduce a preconcerted 
situation, a dramatic incident, a striking figure, a happy 
allusion ! With what pertinence, for example, he brings into 
a discussion on the budget, the portrait of Marshal Gouvian 
Saint-Cyr, drawn beforehand, so admirably drawn ! 

But if the longer discourses of General Foy, despite the 
perfect exposition of the subject, the perspicuity of the dic- 
tion and abundance of the arguments, are not without faults ; 
if they may be reproached with betraying somewhat of the 
compass, being a little too elaborate, with smelling too much 
of the lamp, 1 should not say the same of his extempora- 
neous eflbrts which flowed with equal facility and brevity. 
How natural ! what vivid and powerful irony ! what in- 
credible felicity of retort ! and this on all occasions, at each 
step, at every interruption, and always the exact, the deci- 
sive word ! To some who reproached him with regretting 
the tri-colored cockade : 

'' Ah ! he said, it surely would not be the shades of 
Philippe-Auguste and of Henry IV. that should feel indig- 
nant, in their tombs, to behold the jieurs-de-Us of Bouvines 
and of Ivry on the banner of Austerlitz." 

To those who asked him tauntingly : What then do you 
call the aristocracy ? 

" The aristocracy ! I shall tell you : the aristocracy is 
the league, the coalition of those who would consume with- 



GENERAL FOY. 117 

out producing, live without laboring, possess themselves of 
all the public offices without being qualified to fill them, 
seize upon all the honors of the state without having merited 
any — this is the aristocracy !" 

To those who cried : Adjourn ! adjourn ! — " You natur- 
ally wish adjournments, and not truths. The truths swamp 
you." 

To a fellow who said to him : Send your foreign news to 
the Bourse : 

" I know nothing of the gamblings of the Bourse ; I 
only speculate in the rise of the national honor !" 

To certain deputies who pretended that the commission of 
censorship had been placed under half-pay : " If this be true, 
I desire that the commission be treated as th^ half-pay offi- 
cers are for two years back. I desire it be never recalled 
into service." 

To ministers who defended the ludicrous extravagance 
and sinecures of the department of foreign affairs : " Ac- 
quaint us then with those diplomats of yours, who have 
served neither before, nor after, nor during our heroic revo- 
lution ; your pensions to this man for writing a book, to 
the other, not to write one ; your physicians who have never 
had a patient to attend j your historiographers with no his- 
tory to record ; your sketchers who know of no other land- 
scape to draw than the kitchen-garden of Wagram." 

Speaking of M. de Serre, a renegade to liberalism : 
" There are in politics situations so degraded that they ce*ase 
to go for anything in any division of opinion." 

Directly addressing de Serre, keeper of the seals : " As 
sole vengeance, as sole punishment, I condemn you, sir, to 
cast your eyes, as you leave this hall, upon the statues of 
d'Hopital and Dagesseau !" 

This oratorical apostrophe is of the highest beauty. 

They were proud times compared with ours, those times 
of the Opposition of fifleen years since, times never to' re- 
turn ! The Carbonari had not yet quitted their stalls and 
cellars, to revel in the orgies of power. The deputies of 



118 THE RESTORATION. 

the Left had not yet forsworn their oaths, had not basely sac- 
rificed democracy to dastardly concessions, to disgraceful 
honors or womanish fears. People then were in the inno- 
cence of early illusions. They put faith in the probity of 
politicians. You did not see under the garb of a colleague a 
hand preparing to betray you, a dagger ready to pierce you. 
The deputies of the Opposition had all but one voice, one soul, 
one sentiment. They watched, all over each, and each over 
all. Always booted and spurred, always on the breach, 
beaten on one side, rallying themselves on the other, and 
never despairing of their little band, of liberty or the future. 
Systematically organized, they had their chiefs, their ad- 
vanced guards, their flank and main armies, their plan of at- 
tack and defence, their password. France observed them 
with eyes and heart, and attended their struggles with ap- 
plauses and palms. There was, it must be repeated, some 
honor in being then deputy. It was a great one to be an 
orator, greater than to have gained victories — for formerly 
there were victories and heroes by the hundred. But to- 
day to be a deputy is so small a matter ! To be a peer is 
still less, much less. We have seen so many mountebanks 
gambol on the trestle of the Representative ! In vain do 
our polichinellos now play their antics ; the people turn away 
disgusted and seek other amusements. 

General Foy, for his part, took up his representative 
duties in earnest, and studied them day and night. He col- 
lated assiduously the documents and reports, the ordinances 
and the laws. He dictated, took notes, analyzed his im- 
mense reading, culling thus the flower of each subject where- 
from to compose his honey. He did not disdain to descend 
into the labyrinth of our financial laws. He conned our 
voluminous budget, chapter by chapter, article by article, 
with the dry and minute patience of an office clerk. Nothing 
escaped his amazing sagacity. Equally attentive to the de- 
tails of execution and the spirit of the rules, he investigated 
the occasion of the expenditures, calculated the accounts, 
verified the figures, and decomposed the entire elements of 



GENERAL FOY. 119 

each department of service. He saw into all, examined 
all, discussed all. Ecclesiastical law, civil law, procedure 
even, he must needs understand. Loans, rents, taxes, civil 
list, press, public instruction, internal administration, foreign 
affairs, nothing appertaining to those questions so diverse 
and so difficult found him unprepared. He was a man of 
iron, one of those men of the Napoleonian school, who went to 
the conquest of liberty with the same pace that they marched 
to the conquest of the world, with erect brow and resolute 
eye, without fear of obstacles or doubt of victory ; who sac- 
rifice their days, their nights, their fortunes, their health, 
their existence to duty ; who cling, as if by cramps, to what- 
ever is most difficult in each subject, who never flag, who 
live, and who die of the energy of their will ! 

But what evinces especially the superior sense of General 
Foy, is the bloody struggle, the returning struggle of every 
day, which he maintained to prevent the alteration of the 
electoral law. The electoral law ! this in effect is the whole 
government, the whole State, the whole Constitution. I 
might even go so far as to say that there is in the country 
no other political law, or if you will, in other words, that it 
contains all other laws, since it is the mother law of all. 
The Constitution is society at rest. The electoral law 
is society in action. Tell me who are your electors, 
and I will tell you what is your government. If they be 
place-holders, you will have a despotism. If the wealthy 
proprietors, you will have an oligarchy. With the suffrage 
universal, you will have a democratic government. 

General Foy felt instinctively that the electoral law of 
qualification would infallibly bring the government into 
the hands of the mercantile and moneyed class. He labored, 
without intending it, for the ignoble triumph of the every. 
one-for-himself principle. In history, however, we see 
but the people and the aristocracy who have accomplished 
great things. The wealthy burgess class never rise above 
the altitude of the breeches pocket. A burgess regime, 



120 THE RESTORATION. 

without liberty and without glory, I much doubt if Foy, 
while subserving it, would have greatly relished. 

To what end, for the rest, so many fine speeches 
about the simple vote and the double vote ! Is it that in 
the assemblies of a monopoly representation, Eloquence, 
that daughter of heaven, has ever cured a corrupted heart 
or rectified a perverted intellect ? Is it that it is ever law 
that governs the world — and not the unforeseen ? Who 
would have said, three days before the 25th of July, that a 
coup-cC^tat would demolish the Constitution, and three days 
after, that a popular insurrection should subvert the mon- 
archy ? Eloquence produces at most the effect of the drum 
which beats the charge ', but it is the musketry and cannon- 
shot that decides the victory. 

A noble heart was that of General Foy, a heart full of 
lofty sentiments of patriotism and national independence, a 
heroic heart, loving glory, not for himself, not for its own 
sake, but for that of his country, as it was loved at Austerlitz, 
as it was loved in the days so pure of the dawning repub- 
lic ! Never had the army, that pearl of our national diadem, 
in the parliamentary lists, a more brilliant knight. They 
have the weight of authority, those men who talk of war, 
while exhibiting a breast covered with scars and arms fur- 
rowed by the bullets of the enemy ! 

It is reported that his private life deserved all admiration, 
the life of a soldier and a citizen, tender and blameless in 
his family affections, devoted to his friends, simple and stu- 
dious, upright, guileless, disinterested, and worthy, like the 
great men of antiquity, to be written by another Plutarch. 

There is in the discourses of General Foy I know not 
what of chaste and attractive, I know not what odor of 
virtue, what grace of the heart which, in the orator, makes 
us love the man : you see, you feel that in speaking, his 
soul is upon his lips. 

But they will open no more, those eloquent lips ! the 
flame of eloquence has consumed them. Yes, the tribune is 
death to the conscientious orator. He has no rest by day 



GENERAL F O Y . 121 

and no sleep by night. He lives but a life of agitation and 
excitement. The action of the organs is suspended or pre- 
cipitated. The head turns gray and the hands are tremu- 
lous, tiie heart contracts, dilates and breaks. 

Vainly have I postponed, I find myself obliged to meet 
a question of political physiology which I have proposed 
myself a hundred times. Had Louis XVIII. on his return 
from Gand, offered General Foy the governorship of a prov- 
ince, who can say that General Foy would have refused 
it, and if not, what would have become of all that tempest 
of eloquence? not even mere wind. How many have we 
not witnessed, in the Chamber of 1816, and out of it, of this 
kind of liberals, and among the most ardent who were such 
only for the nonce, the parvenue nobility of Napoleon, 
because they were stupidly ashamed of being branded on 
the forehead with the original sin of low birth. Tiie pro- 
pensity to please the master has always been with th« 
French, the malady of the most respectable people. Nearly 
all the friends of General Foy, almost all the deputies whose 
sad and sorrowful faces seem to weep on the bas-reliefs of 
his mausoleum, have deserted the sacred cause of liberty 
which constituted their glory and our hope ! All those 
Scevolas, those Cincinnatuses, those Brutuses of the Opposi- 
tion, except two or three, have plunged body and soul into 
the new regime. Would General Foy have, like the others, 
embraced the altars of the 7th August? It is with pain 
I say that I believe he would. In truth, no orator of the 
Left made, under the Restoration, so many dynastic profes- 
sions : he overwhelmed the Bourbon family with so many 
compliments, so many significant protestations, so many 
delicate attentions, that some have doubted that he would 
have passed in 1830 into the popular ranks. But there are 
other reasons still more decisive. 

General Foy was one of the confidants of the Orleans 
coterie. In the Chamber of 1825 he advocated the appurte- 
nances of the crown. He would gladly have torn up tlie 
historic escutcheons of the old nobility, to which he did not 

11 



122 THE RESTORATION. 

belong. But perhaps he would have been less virulent 
against that holiday nobility wiiich haunts at present the 
halls of the Tuileries. He inclined to a hereditary peerage 
with Casimir Perrier and almost the entire Opposition for 
fifteen years. A man of action, a man of excitement, he 
would have gone with the current of 1830. He would 
have left the people on the shore, and embarked in the 
golden vessel which bore the fortunes of another dynasty. 
To resist the temptation, it was not sufficient to have a noble 
heart, it was not sufficient to have eloquence ; it was neces- 
sary to have principles : General Foy had none. The best 
of our monopoly orators are often but poor politicians. They 
drape themselves theatrically in the purple of constitutional 
fopperies. They trumpet the words equality, liberty, coun- 
try, independence, economy, virtue. They know the 
proper place of every figure of rhetoric, the apostrophe, 
the metaphor, the prosopopoeia. They open wide their 
mouth to inspire the bald official acclamations which have 
been squandered turn after turn upon Louis XVI., upon the 
Convention, the Directory, the Consulate, the Empire, the 
Restoration and all the rest. They can tell you how to 
gloss the usurpations of force and fraud upon the rights of 
the people. But of the origin of those rights, of their sove- 
reignty, their universality, their imprescriptibility, their in- 
violability, their character, and their guarantees, what do 
they understand ? This is not to be learned in the school 
of the rhetoricians or the parliaments of privilege. The 
book of the people has never been open before their eyes. 

How many a time has Napoleon regretted having sur- 
vived a day ! Oh ! how he envied, upon the rock of Saint- 
Helena, the destiny of the soldier who fell by the first bullet 
at Waterloo ! Fortune, on the contrary, in entombing him 
in the midst of his oratorical triumphs, has been unwilling 
that General Foy should lose anything of his noble name 
and his spotless renown. Had -he lived, he had been a 
courtier of Louis-Philippe, Minister of war, Mai'shal of 
France, Constable perhaps! He has done better, and djpd. 



ENJAMIN CONSTANT. 123 



BENJAMIN CONSTANT. 

Benjamin Constant was the orator and the publicist of 
the English school : a sickly exotic which will never be ac- 
climated in France ; an incomprehensible trinity of per- 
sons unequal in power, different in origin, opposite in will — > 
a strange constitution wherein people pretend to find elemen- 
tary principle in accidental amalgamation, harmony in an- 
tagonism, truth in fiction, movement in resistance, and life 
in death — a systematic division into hierarchies, castes, mo- 
nopolies, privileges, of a society which tends incessantly to 
agglomeration and unity — a production, in fine, anti-French 
and anti-natural, which is repulsive to temperament, man- 
ners, logic and equality, which loads the feet of the govern- 
ment yistead of giving it wings, which imparts to it neither 
force within nor grandeur without, and seems eternally on 
the eve of perishing in the tempests of democracy, or under 
the iron heel of some fortunate soldier. 

But perhaps, after the enervating influence of despotism 
upon the hearts and minds of the public, the nation, infirm 
and sickly, had strength to bear but a regimen of transi- 
tion : perhaps remedies too heroical would have proved 
fatal. 

Benjamin Constant was wonderfully well qualified to ex- 
tract from this mixed regime, all that it might have con- 
tained of just and liberal. He even exaggerated the conse- 
quences of the Charter of 1814, and had imagination enough 
to think that he had favored liberty in the particular, where 
it was clearer than day that he had meant to advance, and 
had in fact advanced, but the interests of power. 

Swayed, against his own will, by the genius of our na- 
tion, he explained upon the theory of equality, those English 
institutions which have been contrived but for an aristocracy. 

This was what we os^ll ^a t^W^ <;otir»r> nnon fiffion. with a 



124 THE RESTORATION. 

vengeance. But what matter for the source, provided good 
be done ? Benjamin Constant put the nation in train. He 
taught, before acting, to think. He educated politically the 
middle classes, not being able to do so by the masses. 

Benjamin Constant had neither the facility of Manuel, 
nor the profundity of Royer-CoUard, nor the vehemence of 
Casimir-Perrier, nor the brilliancy of Foy, nor the harmony 
of Laine, nor the graces fo Martignac, nor the power of 
de Serre ; but of all the orators of the Left he was the 
most intellectual, the most ingenious, and the most pro- 
lific. 

He was of slim make, lank-legged, round-shouldered, 
long- armed. A profusion of yellow and curling hair fell 
over his shoulders, and enchased becomingly his expressive 
countenance. His tongue sometimes stuck between his 
teeth, and gave him the lisping of a woman, something 
between a whistle and a stammer. When he recited, he 
drawled the voice monotonously. When he extemporized, he 
rested both hands on the front of the tribune, and rolled forth 
the flood of his words. Nature had denied him all those 
exterior advantages of person, gesture and voice of which 
she has been so prodigal towards Berryer. But he supplied 
these deficiencies by force of intellect and labor. 

An unwearied soldier of the press and the tribune, and 
armed with this, his two-edged sword, Benjamin Constant 
did not, during a fifteen years' campaign, leave the breach a 
single moment. When he was not speaking, he wrote ; when 
he was not writing, he spoke. His articles, his letters, his 
pamphlets and discourses would compose over a dozen vol- 
umes. 

It was the written discourses of Foy, Bignon, Constant, 
Lafitte, Dupont, (d I'Eure,) Royer-Collard in particular, that 
accomplished the education of the liberal party of France. 
Speeches which produce little efl^ect in the Chambers, on the 
deputies, may exercise great influence in print, upon the 
public. If they have less influence on the formation of 
laws, they have more in the formation of opinion ; and ulti- 



BENJAMIN CONSTANT. 125 

mately, is it not opinion that gives sanction to the laws ? 
Is it not better to have millions of readers than a few hun- 
dreds of auditors ? This furnishes, besides, a commodious 
and quite simple means of deciding that much controvert- 
ed question about the relative superiority of writing and 
speaking. No one now reads speeches, no one listens to 
extemporizers. 

Never did orator manage with more dexterity than Ben- 
jamin Constant the language of politics. Whence is it 
that we can read, up to this day, without fatigue, his 
lengthiest speeches ? It is because they contain the princi- 
ple of perpetuation style, a style full of attraction. Most 
of them are niasterpieces of animated and stringent dialec- 
tic, which have had since nothing to equal them, and which 
are the delight of those capable of appreciating them. 
What wealth of imagery ! Vv^hat abundance of illustration ! 
what flexibility of tone! what varieties of topic! what 
suavity of language ! what marvellous art in the disposition 
and the linked deduction of his reasonings ! how finely tis- 
sued that web ! how exquisitely shaded, how harmoniously 
blended all the colors I Thus we see, beneath a transpa- 
rent and glossy skin, the blood circulate, the veins turn blue, 
and the muscles slightly apparent. 

Perhaps these discourses are even too highly finished, too 
elaborate, too ingenious for the tribune. In reading, if one 
does not comprehend at once, he has the resource of re- 
perusal. If a speaker be not apprehended at once, there 
is no means of obtaining a repetition. Repetitions are in- 
tolerable in reading, they are necessary in the tribune, as in 
the theatre it is only the recitative sounds that familiarize 
thenfiselves completely to the ear of the spectators. Orators 
are like those statues placed in elevated niches, which must 
be cut somewhat roughly to produce effect from a distance. 
The Chambers are not like the drawing-rooms of the aris- 
tocracy. The flowers 'of rhetoric are ordinarily in them 
without fragrance or color. The antitheses escape them, 
and reasonings too vigorously knotted, fatigue their atten- 
11* 



I 



12G THE RESTORATION. 

tion. To be understood, you must repeat the same thing to 
them tliree or four times in succession. To please them, 
you must have regard rather to the strength of the blow, 
than the justness of the aim, and speak to their passions 
rather than to their intelligence. 

The Right disliked Benjamin Constant less than Manuel. 
It is that in French assemblies, of whatever sort, there is al- 
ways a weak predilection in favor of men of wit. Of the 
French preeminently it may be said with the poet : 

Jhi ri, me voild desarme. 

The prejudice of party is proof against eloquence, against 
facts, against logic, against enthusiasm even ; it yields be- 
fore a laugh. 

Benjamin Constant was always master of his expression 
as of his thought. If the Right felt hurt by some word a 
little sharp, he found, without breaking the thread of the 
discourse, an equivalent to it, and if the equivalent offended 
still, he substituted a third approximation. This presence 
of mind, this deep knowledge of the resources of the lan- 
guage, this wonderful graduation of softening synonymes, 
used to surprise agreeably his adversaries themselves. So, 
for example, he said : I wish to spare the Crown (murmurs ;) 
he changes — the Monarch (murmurs still ;) he resumes — the 
constitutional King, (the murmurs cease.) 

Benjamin Constant was much more caustic than Manuel. 
But he steeped his sting in honey. He said what he pleased 
because he had the art of saying what he pleased. More- 
over, though a liberal and an opponent, Benjamin Constant 
was a thorough gentleman, and those Chambers of gentle- 
men had a foible for this quality. 

It must be added that he was endowed, in the highest per- 
fection, with that power of adaptation which distinguishes 
literary men, and is the faculty of penetrating and active 
imaginations. This description of minds will present you a 
subject in a variety of modes of resemblance which create 
an illusion to the common eye. They have but the sem- 



BENJAMIN CONSTANT. 127 

blance of science. They have often but the terms, and you 
would think they are masters of the substance and founda- 
tion. 

His discourses abounded in lively, ingenious, and keen 
expressions. He characterized the press as follows : 

'' The press is the tribune amplified. Speech is the ve- 
hicle of intelligence, and intelligence is the mistress of the 
material world." 

He defined the censorship : " A monopoly of calumny 
exercised by baseness for the profit of power." 

Of the ministry, he used to say : " It is as impossible, in 
all that pertains to despotism, to calumniate, as to soften 
them." 

Speaking of some deputies who made verbose defences of 
sinecures : " They are not for economy in either money or 
words." 

All this is witty, but it savors of the writer rather than 
of the orator. 

Here is a brilliant denunciation of the lottery system, 
which will give an idea of the excellences and defects of 
liis manner : 

" If there existed, gentlemen, in your public squares, or 
in some obscure den, a species of game which brought in- 
fallible ruin upon the players ; if the director of this illicit 
and deceitful concern were to avow to you that he played 
with an absolute certainty of vv'inning, that is to say, in op- 
position to the rules of the most ordinary probity ; that to 
insure the success of his dishonest speculation, he lays his 
snare for the class the most easily- deceived and cor- 
rupted ; if he were to tell you that he surrounds the poor 
with allurements; that he drives the innocent to the most 
culpable deeds ; that he has recourse, for the purpose of 
inveigling his prey, to legerdemain and lying ; that his lies 
and impostures are hawked in open day in every street of the 
city ; that his absurd and illusory promises are rung in the 
ears of credulity and ignorance; that he has organized a 
system of secrecy and darkness, so that these dupes should 



128 



THE RESTORATION 



plunge into the gulf before reason could enlighten, fear of 
blame repress, or the warning of their neighbors preserve 
them from the temptation — were he to add, that to respond 
to his perfidious invitations, renewed incessantly, the domes- 
tic robs his master, the husband pillages his wife, the father 
his children, and that he, seated tranquilly in his privileged 
cavern, at once instigator, and receiver, and accomplice, 
stretches out his hand to grasp the produce of theft and the 
miserable pittances torn from the subsistence of families — 
if he ended by admitting that year after year the disorders 
which he occasioned brought his victims from want to crime 
and from crime to the prison, suicide, or the scaffold ; what 
would be your sentiments ?" 

When Benjamin Constant was woi'ried by interruptions, 
his eye would flash fire, and he poured forth a volley of 
natural and cutting repartees. He turned everything to 
account, a letter, a fact, the slightest circumstance, a histor- 
ical analogy, an admission, an exclamation, a word. With 
elbow on the edge of his desk, ear erect, outstretched neck, 
pen in hand, he seemed to devour the debate, the tribune 
and the speaker. His attention was so absorbing and his 
facility of composition so great, that while listening to the 
discourse of his adversary he wrote currente calamo its refu- 
tation, which he came forward to read immediately to the 
tribune. Method, arrangement, argument, style, it was in 
all complete ; such was his power of self-isolation and self- 
abstraction, not only from the noise and throng around him, 
but even from his own emotions ! 

But it must be said, these refinements of style, this ex- 
quisite elegance, this art of hair-splitting synonymes, takes 
from parliamentary recitation its vigor, it3 natural suppleness, 
and even its grace. The tribune should not smell too much 
of the Academy, nor the orator be but an artist. To each 
place the proper kind, to each personage the proper char- 
acter. 

There are two species of dialectic : the one compact and 
nervous, the other insinuating and acute ; the one batter- 



BENJAMIN CONSTANT. 129 

in'T down by the weight of its reasonings, the other piercing 
through with the sharp point of its dart ; the one going 
directly to seek the question in the question, the other twist- 
ing itself about it, and penetrating it by the joints and issues. 
Benjamin Constant had this latter species of dialectic. 

There are two sorts of eloquence : the one issuing from 
the depth of the soul, as from a spring, rolling along its 
copious floods, sweeping all before it, ov#\vhelming by its 
very mass, pressing, upsetting, ingulfing its adversaries; 
the other weaving its threads around them, drawing them 
gradually into its web, fascinating them with its gaze, entan- 
gling them, liming them, holding them fast, and putting them 
to death by a thousand bites. Benjamin Constant had this last 
sort of eloquence. It dazzled rather than warmed. He 
was more adroit than vehement, more persuasive than con- 
vincing, more picturesque than profound, more artful than 
strong, more subtile than solid. He loved art as a political 
instrument, he also loved it for its own sake. He delighted 
in the niceties of style, in the oppositions of words and of 
thoughts, and he amused himself in glancing the sunbeams 
from the facets of the antithesis. Parliamentary oratory re- 
quires more of nerve, of gravity, of simplicity and ampli- 
tude. To be an orator, it is not necessary to strive too much 
to appear one. 

Benjamin Constant was not a mere speech-maker, he was 
also a great publicist; and it is in this Quality more especially, 
that he has assumed the mission of protecting political wri- 
ters. No one has better understood, no one has better de- 
fended, than he, the rights of the press — of that power more 
mighty than armies, religions, legislatures and kings, more 
rapid than the winds, more boundless than space, as intelli- 
gent as thought. But the special character of all the par- 
liaments of the Restoration, was the envious, instinctive and 
deadly hatred of the press. Had they a latent presentiment 
that the press would prove their overthrow ? Yes, the press 
did indeed overthrow them, but they gave it no small aid. 
Besides this, the tribune has, in all times, been jealous of 



130 THE RESTORATION. 

the press. The tribune has always sought to humble it by- 
pot-house abuse, and to stifle its voice beneath iniquitous 
proceedings and outrageous penalties. It is the revolt of 
property against intellect. The most obscure deputy of 
the most unknown village of France has the pitiful presump- 
tion to think himself far above a journalist. He does not 
dream that one of those country hinds, who mounts the tri- 
bune, there to milflth their patois, would not be deemed wor- 
thy of admission among the paper-folders, and superscribers 
of the editor's back office, lest they should bungle the subscri- 
ber's name on the wrapper. 

Benjamin Constant never forgot, that before being depu- 
ty, he was an editor, and that this was the highest feather 
in his cap. On every occasion, and at every moment, he 
called with energy for reform of the arbitrary feature of the 
censorship, the abolition of all exceptional jurisdiction, the 
trial by jury in offences against the Court and the tribunals, 
and the liberty of publication. To-day, he would have the 
same guarantees to ask for ; for, to the shame of a govern- 
ment, born of the blood and vitals of the press, the press still 
writhes and struggles in the same shackles as under the 
Restoration. Its only alternative is to lie or be silent. It 
must either abstain from discussing the principle of the gov- 
ernment, or receive the kicks and spittings of a gouty Sen- 
ate. It is bound hand and foot, and placed, thus manacled, 
between the ruin of confiscation and the burning tombs of 
Salazie ; and as a worse insult, a last torment, the vile tools 
of all this are heard to bawl themselves hoarse in crying : 
" A triumph ! a triumph ! the press is free !" 

Benjamin Constant loved to bestow magnificent eulogies 
upon the studious youth of the schools. Now, this youth is 
sunk in inertness like the rest of the nation. We surcharge 
its memory, in place of forming its judgment. Its tender 
mind is enervated by a superfetation of lectures and courses. 
It is dipped over and over in the materialities of eclecticism. 
It is taught neither religion, nor morality, nor logic, nor 
brotherly love, nor love of country. But it must be owned 



BENJAMIN CONSTANT. 131 

the studious and golden youth has never been more expert 
at dancing the cachucha. 

Constant's instruction as a legislator was not particularly 
solid. Like all the publicists of the Restoration, he was 
little versed in the material interests and the true principles 
of industrial and rural economy. There was also in his re- 
ligious notions and his political philosophy, something of 
vagueness, as of a reflection of the infidelity and scepticism 
of the 18th century. His faith was that of the intellect, 
not that of the heart. He did not value religion for its 
dogmas, but for its soothing influence upon the conscience. 
He did not give his support to Royalty because it was right, 
but because it was necessary. He disapproved not the prin- 
ciples of a republic, but its form. " Republican institutions," 
he used to say, " are impossible in the state of general intelli- 
gence, in the condition industrial, mercantile, military and 
European of France." It was with him a question of op- 
portunity, almost of geography. 

He attacked Rousseau for having maintained the divine 
right, while he himself disallowed the sovereignty of the 
people, holding but a sort of sovereignty of justice, not un- 
like the sovereignty of reason of the Doctrinarians, and quite 
as undefinable, as incomprehensible, as inapplicable. Does 
not the sovereignty of the people, such as we understand it, 
imply necessarily the sovereignty of right, of justice, and 
of reason ? I know scarcely a single political or social 
question that the sovereignty of the people does not solve. 

Politically, the sovereignty of the people is the luminary 
which shines in the darkness of human disputation. It is 
by its light alone that the logicians can proceed. Beyond it 
all is arbitrary, is iniquity, contradiction, chaos. For want 
of this pilot so sure, so infallible, the greatest politician of 
the Restoration went head-foremost, like a vulgar helmsman, 
upon the shoals of the Revolution of July. He did not see 
that no power can either prescribe, or prevail against, the 
eternal right of nations to govern themselves as they please. 

His second error was to imagine that he could hold oflice 



132 



THE RESTORATION 



and retain his independence. Instead of staying with the 
people on the bank, and looking on while the Doctrinarian 
torrent was passing away, he stopped in the middle of the 
current and was carried off by the flood. His lofty reason 
stooped and his imagination became quite reconciled to the 
situation. Before, a look from Napoleon was enough to 
fascinate him. He now fell anew under the charm of an- 
other power. But he recovered gradually the plenitude of 
liis faculties. He opened his eyes and saw with Lafayette, 
Salverte, Arago, and all that glorious band of patriots, that 
the Revolution of July was not a peace, but a truce. He 
would soon have abandoned the booty to mix in the scram- 
ble, and been dismissed or resigned, had he not been slow to 
sound the signal of opposition. 

But already the springs of life were fast giving way. His 
noble head was drooped, and he sometimes held it between 
his hands as if to meditate on the vanity of revolutions. His 
dreams of the future, those beautiful illusions which for fif- 
teen years back he had been cherishing, had vanished be- 
fore him, one after the other. He felt himself affected with 
gloomy dejection and invincible melancholy. He crawled 
with difficulty from his bench to the tribune, and with pallid 
lips which could smile no more, he bade adieu to dying lib- 
erty and descended with it into the tomb. 



ROYER-COLLARD. 133 



ROYER-COLLARD. 

RoYER-CoLLARD IS the Venerable patriarch of the consti- 
tutional royalists of the Restoration. 

We may now speak of Royer-Collard with entire impar- 
tiality and unreserve. He has still jf seat in the Chamber 
of Deputies, but he takes no part in the debates. He passes 
back and forth before us, merely to remind us that such a 
man has lived ; like those majestic caryatides of Osiris and 
of Isis which the Romans, when masters of Egypt, used to 
place in front of the new temples, to testify to futurity that 
there had been on these shores another temple and other di- 
vinities, a different creed and different pontiffs. 

Seated at the head of the Chamber, M. Royer-Collard no 
more directs, he observes. He does not speak, he meditates. 
He now belongs but to the past. We may already pass 
upon him the judgment of the dead. 

The Chambers of the Restoration had divers politi- 
cal schools. General Foy represented the military school ; 
Casimir Perrier, the financial school ; de Serre, the gram- 
matical school ; Benjamin Constant, the constitutional school ; 
Royer-Collard, the philosophical. 

He had less brilliancy than General Foy, less subtlety, 
dialectic skill and flexibility than Benjamin Constant, less 
impetuosity and fire than Casimir Perrier, less of legislative 
science and of originality than de Serre. But he was the 
first of our parliamentary writers. He had a sort of large 
and magnificent style, a firm touch, certain erudite and pro- 
digiously elaborate artifices of language, and those feliei- 
tous expressions which cling to the memory and which are 
the lucky chances of the orator. There is a virility in his 
speeches which reminds one of Mirabeau, and some orator- 
ical movements scarce sooner loosed than checked, as if he 
feared their vehemence ; a lofty reason in matters of relis^- 

12 



134 THE RESTORATION. 

ion and morals ; on every subject, a method ample without 
stiffness, severe, dogmatical. 

A single axiom, a word impregnated by the meditation of 
that powerful head, germinated, grew up, expanded like the 
acorn which becomes an oak, all whose ramifications spring 
from the same trunk, and which, animated by the same vi- 
tality, nourished by the same sap, forms but an individual 
whole, despite the variety of its foliage and the infinite mul- 
tiplicity of its branches. Such v/ere the discourses of Royer- 
Collard, admirable for the vigorous shoots of the style and 
the beauty of the form. 

It was philosophy applied to politics, with its abstract and 
rather obscure formularies. M. Royer-Collard was, if I 
may be allowed the expression, a delver of ideas. He was 
a speaking intellect. 

There is sometimes, however, more void than substance 
in that profundity, and the splendor of the form deludes re- 
specting the hollowness of the principles. 

M. Royer-Collard has, more than any other man, by the 
authority of his name and his eloquence, contributed to the 
formation of our public manners termed constitutional. He 
urged the middle classes, without meaning it, to the subver- 
sion of the throne. He was one of the most, unintentional 
no doubt, but one of the most active, demolishers of that 
regime. 

A burgess royalist, an able, ardent and inexorable enemy 
of aristocratic privileges, he assailed them without respite 
by means of irony, of argument, of eloquence. But could 
a conceded charter dispense with the support of an interme- 
diate body ill fhe State? This charter was not a contract, 
but a gift. A mountain rock with the soil removed from 
around its base must fall. So fell the throne. To attack 
the crown and disarm the people, this was the inconsistency 
of the liberals of those times. 

Fifteen years were spent in organizing antagonism be- 
tween the Chambers and the King. The latter pushed for- 
ward to its proper end of despotism, the former to their pro- 



ROYER-COLLARD. 135 

per end of omnipotence. The Restoration was but a per- 
petual struggle between these two powers, to gain, one upon 
the other, a few inches of ground. But the true theory of 
the matter recognizes but a single power of which no one 
.then made the least account — the nation. King, president, 
consul, chambers, ministers are but the delegates of the na- 
lion. To one class of delegates it intrusts the legislative, 
to another the executive department. It does not say to 
them : Divide yourselves into factions and waste the time in 
partisan conflict ; but it says : Cultivate a community of 
understanding and agreement, and a harmony of policy and 
procedure. What would a farmer say to his plough-boys, 
if, instead of tilling the soil and gathering in the harvest, 
they should fall to beating each other, to the infliction of 
bloody noses'? What would a manufaclurer say to his op- 
eratives, if, in place of keeping each to his tools and his 
trade, they were to set to quarrelling with each other ? 
In the working of any machine whatever, be it industrial 
or political, there must be unity, there must be harmony. 

The theories of representative government which se- 
duced M. Royer-Collard, are more metaphysical than po- 
litical, more speculative than experimental. They are 
ranored in beautiful order; but hobble, when set a-going. 
He has varnished them over with the colors of a brilliant 
style, but they will not bear analysis, they would not with- 
stand the slightest assault of logic. 

His subtile and too often misty distinctions between per- 
sonal qualifications and public interests, as conditions of 
representative eligibility, between parties and factions, be- 
tween the sovereignty of the people and the sovereignty of 
reason, are arguments for the schools, rather than for the tri- 
bune. It is almost always a professor of philosophy you 
hear speak, not a publicist. 

The political life of Royer-Collard has been but a con- 
tinual passing back and forth, from power to liberty, and 
from liberty to power. He changed from one party to the 
other, shoving to its fate that which was going down, check- 



130 THE RESTORATION. 

ing the precipitancy of the victorious side, forgetting but 
one tiling — never to define the limits of either. 

The error of General Foy, of Royer-Collard, and others, 
was, to contend that, " the Charter, being the fundamen- 
tal law, it was not for theory to discuss it." I humbly 
beg your pardon, gentlemen ; but theory, which is but the 
faculty of free examination, has the supreme right of 
discussing everything ; and in fact, the theory of national 
sovereignty, the sole true one, did discuss the Charter of 
1814 so effectually as to demolish it. 

What a spectacle, what a lesson is this idle and impotent 
struggle of the greatest intellects, against the principle 
greater still of the popular sovereignty, which presses and 
enfolds them, as the bark of the fabled trees did, with their 
invincible clasp, the heroes and the demi-gods of the 
poet ! 

Of this principle, Royer-Collard remarks : " The popu- 
lar will of to-day retracts that of yesterday, without engag- 
ing that of to-morrow." 

To this we might reply, that the absolute monarch too 
may change his will, from minute to minute. But if, in a 
society ruled by a single man, these changes at sight do not 
occur, why should they be made in a country governed by 
law alone ? Why should that which is done for the inter- 
est of one or of kw, be less liable to change than what is 
done for the interest of all ? 

Your life too is your own ; none can hinder you to go 
throw yourself into the river, or shoot yourself: you do not 
kill yourself however ! you may burn your own house or 
level it with the ground ; yet you do not do it ! 

Equally groundless is the objection of M. Royer-Collard, 
drawn from what he calls right. " There cannot be a par- 
ticular right which is in contravention of abstract right — 
that right without which there is nothing upon this earth, 
but a life without dignity, and a death without hope." 

Perfectly well said. But it remains to define right and 
designate where it resides ; this M. Royer-Collard has not 



R O Y E R - C O L L A R D . 137 

done, and it is the wliolo difficulty. Or rather, if you ex- 
amine closely, you will find that definitively this abstract 
rijrht yields to the law of numbers, because definitively it 
results from numbers. This is so true, that right, as it is 
embodied in legislation, as it is determined in application, 
always depends upon a single voice. A hundred and one 
to a hundred, such is the test of the legal riglit which com- 
mands obedience, and which orders and conducts the whole 
society. 

The fundamental laws of which M. Pvoyer-CoUard speaks, 
neither are nor can be but those which the nation has given 
itself, and which it may therefore alter. The national rights 
he speaks of, neither are nor can be other than the rights of 
the nation. There is no going beyond. 

No nation could be governed forever by the laws of its 
fathers, for it would not be free. Nations, being composed 
of men v/ho are in their nature restless and changeable, 
cannot remain stationary and always the same. The dead 
have not the power to bind, against their will, the living. 
Each generation belongs to itself, and can no more bind the 
future than it can have been bound by the past. This is 
fact and right, and what is there to be said against the fact 
and the right ? Nothing. 

" Others," said Royer-Collard himself, " may grieve and 
rage at it ; for my part, I thank Providence that he has 
called to the benefits of civilization a large number of his 
creatures." 

Very well ! that which Royer-Collard demanded for the 
interest of the middle class, we (of the popular party) ask 
for the interest of the people. We ask, as he does, that 
there be called to the benefits of civilization, a still larger 
number of human creatures. M. Royer-Collard is here, 
without suspecting, and without wishing it, on the brink of 
universal sufTrage. He was on his way to it ; we have ar- 
rived. 

Yet he persists : " The sovereignty of the people is but the 
12* 



138 THE RESTORATION. 

sovercijjjnty of brute force, and the form the most absolute 
of absolute power." 

But if the power which emanates from the whole consti- 
tutes necessarily the most absolute of all powers, how should 
not the sovereignty of the people, which is the form of that 
power, be the most absolute of all the forms ? It is the in- 
evitable consequence of the principle. The question besides 
is not whether it forms the most absolute, but whether it be 
the truest and best. 

M. Royer-Collard hastens to add, not without some con- 
tradiction : " With a sovereignty of this sort without rules 
or limits, without duties or conscience, there are neither 
constitutions nor laws, nor good, nor evil, nor past, nor 
future." 

I fear this is no better than pure declamation. For to 
reject the authority of the greatest number, or what is the 
same, of the majority, is to place the government in the 
hands of the minority. Therefore, either it must be ad- 
mitted, that the sovereignty of the minority is also without 
rule or restriction, without duty or conscience, and that 
with it there can be neither constitution, nor law, nor good, 
nor evil, nor past nor future, or it must be allowed that the 
majority or greatest number has duties, rules, limits, con- 
science, quite as well as the minority or lesser number. 

We do not see that the United States, where universal 
suffrage exists in full opinion and full operation, are not 
quite as stable, quite as orderly, quite as moral, quite as 
conscientious as monarchical governments. And in addi- 
tion, they have the advantage of enjoying the realities of 
liberty, while the monarchies have but its shadow ; they 
have right on their side, and how many monarchies can 
with truth say the same? 

From the commencement of the Restoration, M. Royer- 
Collard foresaw the Revolution of July, which was visible 
already on the lowering confines of the political horizon. 
He classified and defined after his manner the only two 



ROYER-COLLARD. 139 

parties who then had any life, and who contended for 
supremacy. 

" There is a faction born of the Revolution, of its bad 
doctrines and its bad actions, whose vague perhaps, but 
whose constant, aim is usurpation, because it has come to 
be a matter of taste with them still more than of want. 
There is a faction born of privilege which detests equality 
and seeks to destroy it at any cost. I know not what these 
factions do, but I know what they mean, and above all I 
understand what they say. I recognize the one by its 
hatred of all legitimate authority, political, moral, religious; 
the other by its instinctive contempt for all rights public 
and private, by the arrogant cupidity which leads it to 
covet all the advantages of public office and of social con- 
sideration. The factions I speak of, reduced to their proper 
force, are weak in numbers ; they are odious to the nation 
and will never strike deep root in its soil : but also they 
are ardent, and while we are divided, they march towards 
their object. If, from the persistence of the government in 
abandoning us and abandoning itself, they should come into 
collision once more, if our unhappy country is to be again 
torn and ensanguined by their conflicts, my mind is made 
up ; I declare in advance to the victorious faction, which- 
ever it may be, that I shall detest its victory ; I ask from 
this day forth to be inscribed on the list of its proscrip- 
tions." 

What M. Royer-Collard terms, in his Doctrinarian phra- 
seology, the struggle of two factions, is no other than the 
contest between aristocracy and democracy, of these two 
indestructible and rival powers, which Providence has 
hidden in the depths of every society, to give them, to the 
end of time, the agitation of vitality. 

M. Guizot, in imitation of his master, has adopted the 
famous distinction between factions and parties ; it being 
understood of course that they are, he and his friends, of 
the category of 'party, that is to say, men of principle, of 
virtue and of genius ; and that their adversaries belong to 



140 T II E R E S T O R A T I O N . 

the denomination of faction, that is to say, a compound of 
profligacy, mischief and ignorance. 

In general, M. Guizot has made large use of the dis- 
courses of Royer-Collard, and he gives us for new what is 
only rejuvenated. 

The elevated reason of M. Royer-Collard, at strife with 
itself upon impossible solutions, was continually giving the 
lie to his borrowed principles. Doubtless, he is separated 
from the democratic party, by his conservative sentiments, 
and his political faith; but he belongs to it, in some sort, 
by his involuntary will, as evinced by expressions that often 
escape him in his speeches. 

Elections, taxation, liberty of the press, military profes- 
sion, law of sacrilege, judiciary organization, public in- 
struction, responsibility of ministers, municipal institutions — 
all the great questions of the day have exercised the medi- 
tations of this grave and lofty genius. All his discourses 
are full of beautiful sentiments. Here are several of them : 

" The crimes of the Revolution were not necessary. 
They were the obstacle, not the means." 
— " Representative government is justice organized, reason 
animated, morality armed." 

— " The beautiful is felt, it is not defined. It is everywhere, 
within us and without us, in the perfections of our nature 
and in the wonders of the sensible world ; in the indepen- 
dent energy of solitary thought and in the public order of 
human societies ; in virtue and in the passions ; in joy and 
in tears ; in life and in death." 

— " The representative governments have been doomed to 
toil. Like the laborer, they live by the sweat of their brow." 
— " Constitutions are not tents erected for sleep." 
— " Special legislation is a usurious borrowing, which ruins 
a government, even while it seems to enrich it." 
— " There are all sorts of republics. There is the aristo- 
cratic republic, that of England : There is the burgess re- 
public, that of France : There is the democratic republic, 
that of the United States." 



ROYER-COLLARD. 141 

— " Ministers have two sorts of responsibility, the dramatic 
and the moral." 

The following on the subject of religion is vigorous in ex- 
pression and elevated in thought. 

" Human societies are born, live and die upon the earth. 
But they do not contain the entire man. There remains to 
him the noblest part of himself — those lofty faculties by 
which he soars to God, to a future life, to unknown blisses 
in an invisible world. These are his religious convictions, 
that true grandeur of man, the consolation and charm of weak 
ness and misfortune, the inviolable refuge against the tyran- 
nies of this world." 

How his eloquence rises with the subject. 

" Religion exists in itself and by itself. It is truth itself 
over which the laws have no jurisdiction. Religion has of 
human but its ministers, weak men like ourselves, liable to 
the same wants, subject to the same passions, mortal and 
corruptible organs of incorruptible and immortal truth." 

And further on in the same discourse : 

"According to the bill of ministers, religion is to do all. 
Not only its kingdom is of this world, but this world is its 
kingdom. The sceptre is passed into its hands, and the priest 
is sovereign. Thus, as in politics, we are straitened between 
absolute power and revolutionary sedition ; so in religion, we 
are pressed between theocracy and atheism." 

And this other passage, how beautiful ! 

" We have passed through criminal times ; we did not 
look for our rule of conduct in the law, but in our con- 
sciences. We have obeyed God, rather than men ; we are 
the same men who have forged passports, and perhaps given 
false testimony, to save the lives of the innocent. God will 
judge us in his justice and his mercy^' 

Where could there be found a livelier picture of the im- 
morality and selfishness of our age, than in the following 
incrimination ? 

" The government, instead of awakening the united ener- 
gies of the people, coldly relegates each to the recesses of 



142 THE RESTORATION. 

his individual helplessness. Our fathers knew nothing of 
this deep humiliation. They had not to witness corruption 
embodied in the public law and held up a spectacle to 
astonished youth, a lesson to manhood." 

We will close these extracts with an admirable fragment 
respecting the life-tenure of judicial functions. 

" When the Executive power, charged to institute the ju- 
diciary in the name of the society, appoints a citizen to this 
eminent office, it addresses him to this effect : ' Organ of the 
law, be like the law impassible ! You will be surrounded 
by all sorts of passions, let them never ruffle your soul ! — 
Should my own errors, should the influences that beset me, 
and which it is so hard to entirely preclude, extort from 
me unjust orders, disobey those orders, resist my seductions, 
resist my threats. As soon as you ascend the tribunal, let 
your heart retain no vestige of either fear or hope. Be 
passionless like the law which you .represent !' 

" The citizen replies : ' I am a mere man, and what 
you enjoin is above humanity. You are too strong, and 
I am too weak : I will surely succumb in this unequal 
struggle. You will misconceive the motives of my resist- 
ance, and will punish it. If you would have me rise above 
my infirmities, you must protect me at the same time against 
myself and against you. Help therefore my weakness ; 
free me from the temptations of fear and of hope ; promise 
that I shall not be removed from office, unless upon convic- 
tion of having betrayed the duties which you impose upon 
me.' 

" The Executive hesitates ; it is the nature of power to 
divest itself reluctantly, of the exercise of its will. Enlight- 
ened at length by experience respecting its real interests, 
and subdued by the ^ver increasing force of circumstances, 
it says to the judge : * You shall be unamoveable !' " 

Subjects, apothegms, thoughts, style, all that is of a time 
gone by and a peculiar man. M. Royer-Collard has pur- 
sued through the vicissitudes of men and things, the dream 
of his favorite form of government. He pursues it still. 



ROYER-COLLARD. 143 

The storms which have long agitated his life have fatigued 
its polemical ardor, but have confirmed him in his opinions. 
He thinks he sees, in the sudden revolutions of our country, 
the trials and the teachings of a Providence which chastises 
people and kings. He holds that there is a moral law 
which rules the world of intelligences, as there are physical 
laws which govern the phenomena of nature. M. Royer- 
Collard lias been a sincere, but a systematic, legitimist. 
For him, legitimacy was, by the antiquity of its insUtution, 
the venerableness of its associations, and the breadth and 
depth of its foundation, the most authoritative expression of 
the social order ; but he was for tempering this order— the 
excess of which constituted despotism — by the austere con- 
ditions of liberty. He made himself, of his dynastic doc- 
trines, a sort of imposing and rationalized religion. He ar- 
ranged his plan of government, as we do a thesis in philos- 
ophy ; a chimera, which is more commendable for beauty 
than for use ; for the mysterious and strong alliances of the 
past and the present, of liberty and power, under the sceptre 
of a dynasty of immemorial origin, are unintelligible to the 
vulgar. Besides, they are constantly breaking, in the appli- 
cation. The equilibrium of this fiction is incessantly de- 
ranged by the irregular current of human affairs. That 
such structures might be kept up, it would be necessary that 
there should never be clouds in the firmament, nor wind in 
the air, and these are card castles, which tumble at the least 
breath. 

What does honor to Royer-Collard beyond all the other 
parliamentary celebrities, is to have strictly conformed his 
conduct to his maxims. Great and rare praise for our times, 
to be simple in manner, not ambitious, disinterested, an hon- 
est man ! 

We may add that the virtue of M. Royer-Collard has 
shone not only by its own splendor, but also by the contrast 
with the corruption of his disciples. 

W^iiile those little college Greeks who lauded so loudly 
the poverty of Diogenes and the simplicity of Plato, have 



144 T HE RESTORATION. 

seized upon the offices of emolument and have filled their 
wallet, Royer-Collard, a philosopher of action as well as of 
words, has been seen to withdraw himself modestly aloof, 
to decline the honors of the Council of State, of the Peerage 
and of the Ministry, and to sequester himself in the solitary 
and profound observation of events. 

Accordingly, in practice, the disciples of M. Royer-Col- 
lard very soon left him there with his philosophy, all alone 
on his sofa. Royer-Collard, who loves order, but not to the 
extreme of despotism, began then to return towards liberty. 
It was a little late, for liberty had ceased to exist. 

Why has it so ceased ? It is that power has never been, 
in France, enough restrained in the extravagant impetuosity 
of its caprices. It has always strayed into the abyss, not 
that it was pushed, but because it threw itself in of itself. 
The old Monarchy, the Empire, the Directory, the Restora- 
tion have perished one after another by the excess of their 
power. The fault in this country is always to govern too 
much, to administer too much, to legislate too much, to regu- 
late too much. Liberty tries at the outset to keep the flood 
within its banks, but it breaks through them, infiltrates and 
escapes so quickly, that there soon remains nothing either of 
its noise or its waters. 

It must also be owned that we are the most forgetful of 
mankind. As soon as they return to us, we applaud with a 
sort of frenzy those whom were probated with indignation. 
Parties in France have not the least rancor. There are 
no roots to their admiration or their hatred. It is no doubt 
a very amiable quality of our nation, this species of heed- 
lessness. But would it not evince that, if we are fitted for 
all the other sciences, by the mobility of our genius, we are 
scarcely adapted for political science, which demands more 
of application, perseverance and steadiness ? 

M. Royer-Collard believes, above all, in the doctrine of le- 
gitimacy. He regrets the displacement of the ancient foun- 
dations of the monarchy. He took no part, either by coun- 
sel, or action, or feeling, in the Revolution, of the Three 



ROYER-COLLARD. 145 

Days. He has advocated the succession of the peerage. 
He has opposed the extension of the electoral privilege. He 
has shed the tears of his eloquence upon the grave of the 
great Perrier, the fatal friend of July. He belongs neither 
to the extreme Left, nor to the dynastic Left, nor even to the 
Third party. He at first voted the budgets, the laws, and the 
measures of the government dictated as they were by fear 
and designed for corruption ; and it was necessary that the 
cup of iniquity should be full to the brim, to bring him to 
cry aloud to them that it was going to run over. And you, 
deputies of the Opposition, forgetful of all this his past ca- 
reer which is not conformable with yours, you call Royer- 
Collard the apostle of liberty ! But M. Royer-Collard him- 
self does not accept this democratic apostleship. He does 
not wish to be thought to have been what he has not been, 
nor to appear what he is not. He wishes to be left with his 
proper character, with his original position, with his public 
conduct, his doctrines, his regrets, with his life quite legiti- 
mist; and although we conceive the government of our 
country in a different manner, that life is sufficiently honor- 
able for us to leave it to go on to the close in its conscien- 
tious and spotless integrity. 

13 



140 THE RESTORATION, 



MANUEL. 



The French Eiijpire revolved around Napoleon, as the 
circumference around its axis. Alone, he directed his ar- 
mies on the field of battle. Alone, in the seclusion of his 
closet, he made and unmade his leagues and treaties. Alone, 
he dispatched his orders to the Prefects of the Interior. 
Alone, he wrote political dissertations in the newspapers, 
then subject to censorship. Alone, he spoke through his 
emissaries, in the mute assemblies of the Legislative body 
and the Senate. So that it might well be said, there was in 
the whole Empire no other general, no other diplomatist, no 
other administrator, no other publicist, no other orator but 
Napoleon. 

Accordingly, when the Tribune became again free, and the 
barriers of eloquence were removed, our parliamentary ora- 
tors advanced upon the course but gropingly, and like men 
disused to public speaking. They were constrained in their 
movements ,* they tried their voice which rendered them but 
feeble and common sounds. 

Manuel appeared. 

Manuel was.tall, had a pale and melancholy countenance, 
an accent provincial but sonorous, and a remarkable sim- 
plicity of manners. 

His manner was to untie difficulties rather than cut them, 
lie wound, with incomparable dexterity, aromiTl each prop- 
osition. He interrogated it, he handled it all over, he 
sounded it so to speak in its inmost recesses, to examine 
what it contained, and then explained it to the Assembly, 
without omission and without ostentation. He was a man 
of lofty reason, natural and without pretension, always mas- 
ter of himself, brilliant and easy in language, skilled in the 
art of exposing, of abstracting and of concluding. These 
qualities delighted the Chamber of Representatives. 



MANUEL. 147 

We must not think that, when political tempests are rag- 
ing, an orator of excessive vehemence always obtains sway- 
over assemblies ; for he pushes, ordinarily, towards extreme 
resolutions, and if he pleases the energetic, he alarms the 
timid, who are always the most numerous. As these imag- 
ine they see, in the dark, swords suspended over their heads, 
.snares sown under their feet, and black treacheries beset 
them on every side, they like speakers of sincerity whom 
they can confide in and believe. As they are affected with 
a trembling of the limbs, they love to take refuge under the 
shelter of serene and firm souls. As their judging powers 
are not vigorous, they like to be presented the questions of 
debate all ready solved. Thus did Manuel. 

When he saw, after the abdication of Napoleon, that the 
executive authority knew not in whose name to deliver its 
commands, that civil war threatened to break out in the midst 
of the foreign war, that the Chamber of Representatives it- 
self was broken into fractions, and that, impelled by a thou- 
sand contrary winds, each acted at random, and inclined, 
some for the Bourbons, some for the Republic, some for the 
Duke of Orleans, some for the Emperor's son, Manuel in- 
voked the choice of the Army, the safety of the Country, 
and the text of the Constitution in favor of Napoleon II. 

The Assembly hailed this proposition with enthusiasm. 
It felt obliged to him for having relieved it from an embar- 
rassing perplexity, and restored it to that unity, so necessary 
to all Assemblies, especially in a season of crisis. 

Manuel was appointed to report the plan of a Constitution ; 
a commission of peril, a charge of confidence, a political 
testament, which, in the name of the dying Chamber, he 
drew up for posterity. He pursued nobly its discussion 
amid the balls and shells that whizzed about his ears. He 
called the citizens to arms. When all was lost, and the 
Prussian cannon was already roaring on the bridge of Jena, 
Manuel, intrepid and calm, repeated from the height of the 
tribune, those words of Mirabeau : " We will not leave this 
hall but by the force of bayonets." 



148 THE RESTORATION. 

Manuel was the most considerable and almost the only 
orator of the Chamber of Representatives. The confidence 
of that Chamber would have placed him at the head of the 
government, under the minority of Napoleon JI. 

His arrival to tlie Chambers of the Restoration was pre- 
ceded by a colossal reputation. Ordinarily, those exces- 
sively trumpeted names do not sustain themselves, and dis- 
gust soon succeeds to enthusiasm. Manuel, besides, was 
internally undermined by a painful malady, which, some 
time after, carried him to the grave ; and under the pressure 
of its anguish, his fine faculties lost something of their force 
and splendor. 

A ministerialist liberal and moderate during the Hun- 
dred-Days, Manuel became, during the Restoration, one of 
the tribunes of the Opposition. He served it with all the 
weight of his character and talent. As he was rather obsti- 
nate than impetuous, he withstood, in the vanguard, the final 
charges of the enemy. As he had more vigor of reasoning 
than oratorical vehemence, he argued every thesis minutely 
and turned against themselves, with equal vivacity and pre- 
cision, the citations of his adversaries. However completely 
closed the discussion, he would always find means of enter- 
ing it on some side or other, and renewed the contest with 
extraordinary subtlety of dialectics and abundance of ampli- 
fication. 

Manuel was the most remarkable improvisator of the 
Left side. His diction was entirely parliamentary, not 
charged with ambitious ornaments, but free from incorrect- 
ness, not remarkably vehement, but also without laxity. 
Perhaps he was a little too prolix, a little diffuse, without 
ceasing however to be quite clear, but apt to retrace his 
steps and repeat himself, like all speakers of extreme fa- 
cility. 

Sometimes he delivered his opinion in writing upon mat- 
ters of finance. His speeches are well composed, but with- 
out large views, without profundity, and without style. 
Manuel, like most extemporizers, could rapidly appropriate 



MANUEL. 149 

the ideas of others, and reproduce them in a skilful and dis- 
criminative order. But he was neither administrator, nor 
philosopher, nor financier, nor economist. Since his expul- 
sion, fed and enriched by substantial studies, he might have 
re-entered with treasures of knowledge upon the legislative 
scene. 

Two men incurred the antipathies in a peculiar degree of 
the two adverse parties : de Serre the antipathies of the Left, 
after his abjuration ; Manuel, tlie antipathies of the Right, at 
all times. 

At that period, the parties were in flagrant hostility to 
each other. 'I he Emigration and the Revolution, aristocracy 
and democracy, equality and privilege, sat in the Chamber 
fronting each other, and hated each other with a deadly 
hatred. Every sitting was filled with little else than subtle 
and long-winded dissertations upon faction and parties, and 
while protesting with the lips the utmost respect for the in- 
tentions of adversaries, what was most incriminated in the 
heart was these very intentions. The truth — now that pos- 
terity has arrived for them — the truth may now be spoken 
respecting those parties. It is, that they were all equally 
acting a part. The royalists wanted the King without a 
Charter ; the liberals the Charter without the King. This 
was the sum of what was true or serious at the bottom of 
the parliamentary debates ; the rest was accident, stage- 
effect, mere talk. Finally, and after fifteen years of scene- 
shifting, the actors and spectators got tired of expecting, and 
it became imperative to disclose the clue of the comedy. 
The King without the Charter, means the Ordinances ; the 
Charter without the King means the Revolution. 

Manuel twined himself subtly around the Charter, as a 
serpent does about a tree which has but the green and flour- 
ishing appearance of life, but is dead within. He com- 
pressed it in his folds, he tortured it, and would have it ab- 
solutely render up what it did not contain. In our day, 
these continual calls to order, ^with interminable speeches 
about the strict or liberal construction of tlie Charter, those 

13* 



150 THE RESTOE-ATION. 

imputations of constitutional treason, those essays of meagre 
metaphysics, would fatigue the auditors. But at that time, 
we were new to representative government, and wished to 
know through curiosity, if really there was something at the 
bottom of all its pretension. 

The ministers, who love to enjoy the realities of power, 
are always in haste to finish. Manuel waged against them 
a war of temporization. He annoyed them at the beginning 
of the discussion with his attacks, and at the end with his 
repetitions. He would send the president amendment after 
amendment, and under pretext of developing them, would re- 
enter upon the main question and extend its ground. Defeated 
upon the amendment, he fell back upon the sub-amendment. 
He manoeuvered thus in a thousand ways, now advancing, 
now retiring, defending like a skilful general every position 
foot to foot, and when he saw himself about to be captured, 
he had himself blown into the air with powder. 

Manuel proved the most judicious man of his party. 
He did not allow himself to be misled by imagination, nor 
dizzied by enthusiasm, that other French malady. He 
weighed things exactly at what they were worth, and his 
vision was so perspicacious and so precise, that he foresaw 
and foretold that a Revolution would proceed from the 14th 
article of the Charter. 

. He had also a very lively sentiment of good-will towards 
the laboring class, and it is perhaps on account of this secret 
sympathy which binds the masses to their defender, that his 
name amongst them remains so popular. The torch of de- 
mocracy threw from time to time along his pathway a few 
of its rays, and it is by the light of its gleaming that he has 
touched upon almost all the great questions of the future. 

The Right listened to Manuel with visible impatience. It 
covered him with its contempt and its insults. Sometimes 
it would shrug its shoulders, sometimes turn its back. Some- 
times it groaned in murmurings that stifled his voice ; at 
times it descended angrily ^from bench to bench, until it 
reached the foot of the tribune, taunting him with the bit- 



MANUEL. 151 

terest sarcasms and epithets the most outrageous. Manuel, 
impassive amid the most violent storms, kept the serenity of 
his countenance and soul unruffled. He received the shock 
unmoved, folded his arms, and waited till silence was re- 
stored, to resume his discourse. 

He was a man of calm intrepidity and a patriotic and 
warm heart, with manners the most aftable, temper the most 
gentle, a rectitude of principle entirely natural, a reserve 
of ambition and a modesty quite singular. I will add no- 
thing respecting his moral qualities. He was the friend of 
Lafitte and of Dupont de I'Eure. This is praise enough. 

There is much more imagination than people think, in all 
parties. They are eager to live and to establish themselves, 
not only in the present and the future but also in the past. 
They recast, they-disposc history at will, and in the interest 
of their passions. They impose, by a stretch of fancy, upon 
some illustrious dead, the part of representing their opinion, 
even when this personage would by no means have been 
willing to represent it, even when this opinion had now lost 
its vitality and almost its name. Thus, the Republicans 
will have it that, under the Restoration, Manuel had been 
their servant. The Doctrinarians of the Tuileries pretend 
that he would now walk in their ways. These are two 
sheer illusions. Manuel had, like millions of Frenchmen 
at this moment, the republican sentiment rather than repub- 
lican opinions. He preferred openly, though free to do the 
contrary, Napoleon II. to a republic. He used to say : 
" The republicans are men not ripened by experience." And 
elsewhere : " That the republic might have charms for men 
of elevated soul ; but that it was unsuited to a great people 
in the actual state of our societies." And lastly : " The 
throne is the guarantee of liberty." Then, again: "Lib- 
erty is inseparable from the throne." He declared, besides, 
for the royal prerogative, for the institution of two Chambers, 
for a hereditary peerage, for the salary of the clergy, for 
the administrative guarantee of the public functionaries. 

No more did Manuel belong to the coterie of the Palais- 



152 THE RESTORATION. 

Royal ; and as it was sought to turn his popularity to the 
advantage of a certain personage, Manuel beset with impor- 
tunities dropped this exclamation : 

" Do not speak to me of that man !" 

It is an opinion quite common, that had Manuel lived, liis 
high experience would have directed the founders of the 
Revolution of July, would have signalized the shoals upon 
which the vessel was drawn by too confident pilots, and 
would have made it impossible for prerogative to overflow 
its banks and submerge the hopes of liberty. At all events, 
noble deeds are to be set above the wisest counsels and the 
finest speeches. No, all the counsels that Manuel could 
offer would not have hindered the fatality of things from 
taking its course ; and as to his discourses, they will pass 
away, they are even passed already. But so long as civic 
courage — more rare a thousand times than military cour- 
age — shall be honored amongst us, the name of Manuel 
will live in the memory of Frenchmen. 

It was in 1823, when all of a sudden the patience of the 
Right gave way. It had already made some noise, when 
Manuel, giving vent to the fulness of his heart, expressed 
his repugnance for the Bourbons. From this instant, his 
name lay on the tables of proscription. With ear erect and 
arm uplifted, his enemies, lurking at the corner of the tri- 
bune, watched and waylaid upon its passage his every ex- 
pression. The tempest hung over his head. Scarce had 
Manuel sketched the indirect and veiled apology of the Con- 
vention, than M. de la Bourdonnaie started from his place 
and called, on ground of indignity, for the expulsion of the 
member from la Vendee. 

The Chamber punished Manuel for having praised the 
Convention and it imitated him itself. It alienated public 
opinion, which is a fault. It abused its power, which is an 
act of cowardice. It produced a political crisis, a thing 
which is the ruin of Chambers as of kings, even when they 
succeed. It violated the inviolability of the tribune. It 
enveloped, in the condemnation of a single expression, the 



MANUEL. 153 

whole parliamentary life of Manuel. Tt prosecuted him 
for a tendency. It struck at the heart of freedom of speech, 
as it had just done by the press. What was strangest, in 
this strange proceeding, was to see the deputies of privilege 
arrogate the right of representing France and speaking in 
her name. Poor France ! They all assume to speak for 
you, those of former days, those of the present day. When 
then, to silence them, wilt thou speak for once thyself? 

The great character of Manuel was not untrue to itself in 
the debate. He wore that placidity of countenance, which 
irritated his weak and violent enemies. He defended him- 
self with an eloquent simplicity, and France has retained 
his words : 

" I declare that I recognize ni no one here the right to 
accuse or to judge me. Moreover, I look around for judges 
and I find but accusers. I do not expect an act of justice, 
it is to an act of vengeance that 1 resign myself. I profess 
to respect the established authorities ; but I respect still 
more the law by .which they have been constituted, and I 
recognize in them no power whatever, from the moment 
that, in contempt of that law, they usurp rights which it has 
not conferred upon them. 

" In such a situation of things, I know not if submission 
be an act of prudence ; but I know that, whenever resist- 
ance is a right, it becomes a duty. 

" Having arrived in this Chamber by the will of those 
who had the right to send me, I cannot leave it but by the 
violence of those who choose to ari'ogate to themselves the 
right of excluding me ; and should this resolution on my 
part cost me the last extreme of peril, I have only to say 
that the field of liberty has been sometimes fertilized by 
generous blood." 

Manuel kept his word. He maintained his rights to the 
end, yielding only to force. The hand of a gendarme had 
to grapple him upon his seat and tear him from amidst his 
indignant friends. 

The popular throng, who swelled by another immense 



154 THE RESTORATION. 

crowd, were soon after to attend the triumph of his obse- 
quies, accompanied to his residence the democratic tribune. 
But the multitude departed, solitude and silence gathered 
around the illustrious orator. The electoral colleges of the 
day had the cowardice not to re-elect him, not to try at least. 
So true is it, that there is little civic spirit in France ! That 
patriotic services find there but ungrateful memories ! That 
renown the best earned dies there quickly !* 

Meanwhile, strange caprices of fortune ! he little sus- 
pected, this great citizen, when, ignominiously expelled for 
having spoken of the Convention, he left the Chamber like 
a malefactor between two gendarmes, that one day the king 
of his dislike, chased in his turn, would have to embark for 
an eternal exile ; that the son of a Conventionalist would 
occupy the throne and the bed of his master j that the de- 
puties, who had just proscribed a deputy in the name of 
the electoi's, would themselves too, be proscribed by the same 
electors and excluded from the temple of the laws, and that, 
upon the frontispiece of another temple dedicated to her il- 
lustrious men by a grateful country, the immortal chisel of 
David would grave, in front of the figure of Napoleon, the 
emblem of military courage, the figure of Manuel, the em- 
blem of civic courage. 

* The dereliction is not ascribable to "public spirit," strictly speak- 
ing, with which it might entirely consist to countenance individual 
oppression in certain cases, though the expulsion of Manuel was not 
an instance assuredly. Manuel would no doubt have been reinstated 
had the suffrage been universal in France. But it would be, possi- 
bly, from a less lofty and discerning motive than public spirit. 
Something of party tactics perhaps, which would thus attach to it- 
self the devotion and the desperateness of its followers. Something 
more, probably, of that popular^pite, which in the very country in 
question lead to the vindication from oppression, of those incorruptible 
patriots, Marat and Robespierre ; and which, in every country, be- 
sides thinking of itself instinctively whenever the weak is assailed 
by the strong, loves moreover to display its defiance to those who ar- 
rogate the distinction of superiors. Demagogues assure us indeed, 
that it is thepeople's love of " fair play,"' their " gratitude " &c., which 
would not greatly mend the case : the former would oblige to take 



MANUEL. 155 

Manuel bore his ostracism with dignity, but not without 
depression, without some regret for the tribune. " You are 
a man of letters," said the orator to Benjamin Constant, " you 
have your pen ; but what remains to me ?" 

There remained his funeral procession and the Pantheon. 

part (as the people have but too often done in fact) indiscriminately, 
with the criminal, who has the government all against him. And as 
to popular gratitude, it may claim some credit after they have recon- 
ciled it with the proverbial mgratitude of republics. 

No ; public spirit is not only animated by an ardent desire for, 
but also guided by an enlightened and steady view of, the public good. 
And hence, in truth, the defect imputed to the electors of France ; a 
defect, no doubt, common to them with all their kind, whatever the 
country or the constitution. As yet, human nature seems to admit 
of but the wretched and mischievous counterfeit, which is only the 
brass of party Calculation with an alloy of popular Impulse, ster- 
lingly stamped — public .spirit, the public good ! 

I have remarked upon this distinction because of its special appli- 
cation to our own country, where the immoral course in question 
seems to have passed into a maxim of policy with one at least of the 
parties. Accordingly, it is the well-understood ambition or the tact 
(to use a term more appropriately abject) of the knowing ones to get 
themselves somehow martyred in the " cause," as the surest road to 
the canonization of office. And the worse the cause, the better the 
claim—doubtless upon the equitable principle, that the reward should 
be proportional to the tret and tare of conscience. — Tr's. N. 






'^tU'\iV7vrS, 



/# 



^ A 



\ 



t 






REVOLUTION OF JULY. 



I AM about to v/alk upon live coals, I am come to, I 
am going to paint the orators of my own time. Most 
of these orators have been, are, or will be ministers. They 
have consequently flatterers and maligners, friends and 
enemies. Not to praise them enough is to offend the friends. 
Not to blame them enough is to displease the enemies. 
What is to be done? Be exclusively panegyrist or exclu- 
sively detractor? Then, I should be neither true nor just. 
Be impartial ? With all my heart, when I shall have been 
shown a contemporary, painter or judge of public men, who 
is neither of the Centre, nor of the Third party, nor Demo- 
crat, nor Dynastic, nor Legitimist; for if he belong to one 
or other of these parties — and how should he not ? — he will 
inevitably tincture his pallet with the colors of his opinions, 
and thenceforth he will cease to be impartial ; and should 
he censure me for not seeing things as he does, I might 
reproach him in turn because he does not see them as I do. 
What ! you are displeased that I should judge you accord- 
ing to my principles, and you pretend to judge me accord- 
ing to yours ! There is but one arbiter possible between 
you and me, and who is that ? Posterity ; if it deigns to 
conern itself about such trifles as our present orators and 
Timon their painter. Posterity alone is impartial. But, 
on the other hand, can posterity, which has seen neither 
the things nor the men which it too would essay to paint, 
can it produce a likeness, and is not there always in its 



REVOLUTION OF JULY. 157 

pictures something of imagination and of illusion ? Much 
more, it seeks itself with curiosity for the portraits taken 
by contemporaries, from nature. It studies them, admires 
them and prefers them to its own, and I maintain that it 
does well. 

I do not therefore by any means pique myself upon being 
impartial towards the political orators of my time. I would 
not be so if I could, and 1 could not ff I would. I do not 
pique myself upon being impartial, for I would thus avow 
that good and evil are indifferent to me ; that governments 
may be conducted by any sort of regulations ; that the most 
opposite systems are all equally good, if only they succeed; 
that there is neither true nor false in politics, neither virtue 
nor vice in statesmen ; neither grandeur nor debility in the 
constitution of empires, nor lessons in history, nor experi- 
ence in facts, nor morality in actions, nor consequences in 
principles. 

No, I am not impartial, or rather eclectic, after this 
fashion, and I believe in God in politics, as in everything 
else. 

Let me be permitted here, for I stand in need of it, to 
guard myself against the self-delusions of vanity, the mut- 
tered recriminations and interested suggestions of gentlemen 
among the orators who might pretend that I had viewed 
them with eyes completely blinded by passion, spite, anger 
or some other visual disturbance of this kind, and that I had 
travestied them, merely because I did not bepl aster them 
with a ridiculous excess of praise. Besides, although it be 
hardly ever becoming to talk of oneself, I am bound to tell 
the public who have come to visit my gallery with so much 
eagerness and good will, in what disposition, political and 
mental, I was when T painted our orators. 

I am a radical, but a radical more favorable to a cen- 
tralized and strong government than most of those who call 
themselves conservatives. , I am for liberty, but by the 
constraints of logic, and not the violence of daggers. I am 
also for power, by the intelligent, firm, liumane and just 

14 



158 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

exercise o^ authority, and not by the brute force of oppres- 
sion and arbitrariness. I care no more for despotism than 
for anarchy, no more for anarchy than for despotism. 

1 have taken up my pencil without favor or hatred. I 
have received from those who have sat to me neither bene- 
fits nor injuries. They have offered me nothing, I have 
asked them for nothing. 

My duty and my principles have led me to decline the 
honors of the Bench, of the Council of State and of the 
Ministry, ten years ago, when I was at the age of ambition. 
I have passed that age. All I now desire is to remain in 
the obscure and solitary position into which I have volun- 
tarily retired. I would easily content myself to be still 
less prominent. Is there in our days a- post, however high, 
which is worth a wise man's wish ? And then, in office, 
there is so little time left to live ! and in the present day 
such a wear and tear of conscience, the sole one of all the 
goods of earth which has for me any great value. 

Unquestionably, [ do not despair of the future of my 
country, because after all, the voice of the people is the 
voice of God, and God, it must needs be, at last will speak. 
But it is not my fault that I have lost all illusion, respect- 
ing the men of the present time. I have no confidence in 
one of them even of my own party, and in that dust of 
all parties I look in vain for any man who represents any- 
thing. 

There is in every member of parliament two characters, 
the orator and the politician ; the orator I have portrayed ac- 
cording to my taste as artist, which may well not accord, I ad- 
mit, with the taste of others, and especially the orators, a race, 
vainglorious above all races. The politician I have judged by 
his opinions, when he had any, by mine, as a term of com- 
parison. 

It is now ten years since I began to spread my canvass on 
the easel and charge my pallet, and I. continue still to paint 
without intermission. 

The politics internal and external of a free people are now 



REVOLUTION OF JULY. ,15Q 

no more to be looked for in the intrigues of courts, but in the 
causes and the elTects of parlaimentary debates : to portray 
the orators, then, is to write history. 

It was my design to make this a serious work, and which 
should endure and be connected with the study of our revo- 
lutions, and conducive to a more exact and true knowledge 
of the affairs of my time. Shall I have succeeded ? I should 
think so, if 1 were not liable to deceive myself; and, at all 
events, it would not be for me to say it. 

All I can say, is, that I have been placed, to observe my 
models, in the best conditions wherein a painter has ever 
been. I have seen, I have heard General Foy, Benjamin 
Constant, Manuel, Royer-Collard, Casimir Perrier, Villele, 
de Serre, and in addition, I have undertaken what no one in 
France had ever done before me, and what probably will 
never be done again ; I have read and re-read, one by one, 
the whole cart-loads of their speeches. 

I have witnessed the gathering parliamentary storms, not 
in tlie clouds of Olympus, but at the foot of the tribune, and 
have heard the thunder burst, and the lightning, conducted 
by an electric thread, dj|appear sometimes afar from the pub- 
lic, in the chamber of conference, a few paces from where 
I sat. 

I have seen, alone among so many foreign spectators, the 
actors of our political dramas, dress and undress themselves 
behind the scenes. I have been present, and not another 
painter except me, at the dumb play of their pantomime, at 
their half-confidences — those exchanges of gestures, of looks, 
of smiles — those emotions scarce perceptible of spite, of 
embarrassment, of shame, of anger — those comings and go- 
ings of ministerial aid-de-camps — those dispatchings of notes 
under hand and under the table — those buzzings, orders and 
passwords — those changes of countenance, those sudden 
tackings, those mutual stabs, those devices of warfare and 
of comedy, which explain better a situation of an orator than 
all the studied discourses in the world, and which always 



160 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

escape the ears and the eyes of the Chamber and the re- 
porters, however sagacious. 

Yes, I know these orators well, for I liave lived in close 
intimacy with their public life. But, on the other liand, I 
have fastened against myself the door of their private life, 
and have had no desire even to look through the key-hole. 

It is not the praise of friends that flatters us most, but that 
of enemies ; and we are by so much the more sensible to it, 
that it comes to us mixed with censure and criticism, and 
that its sincerity is thus the better attested. But, sincerity 
is the quality which charms us the most in others, even 
when we do not possess it ourselves. 

The modern orators know well, and, besides, they feel it 
instinctively, that their effusions pass away like the sound 
of their words, — that if they shine with the splendor of 
the meridian sun, they must go down, at the end of the day, 
behind the horizon, into a night without morning or mor- 
row ; and they hold, they cling, as they can, to that life of 
remembrance and of renown which escapes them on all sides. 

Of what avail is it, by a posthumous respect, to print rich 
editions of the speeches of Gener^ Foy, Casimir Perrier, 
Benjamin Constant, and so many others, if nobody touches 
them ? People no more read orators in their works. They 
are now read but in their portraits. 

Doubtless, to live by shreds, by fragments, to live in lit- 
tle more than the name, to live without his works, without 
his words, is scarcely to live to an orator. But it is, at 
least, not to die entirely, and he ought to be thankful to the 
helpful hand which makes an opening in his tomb and lets 
in upon his brow even a single ray of light. 

Let each of those who live still and whom I have drawn, 
interrogate himself; let him examine himself in his own 
mirror, and then in my portraiture, and let him say, his 
hand upon his heart, if he does not think it a good likeness. 

I am firmly persuaded he would ; and it seems to me, if 
I had been myself an orator, at the risk of the conse- 
quences to me, I should wish to be painted by Timon. 



GARNIER-PAGES. 161 



GARNIER-PAGES. 



Alas! how much I have already lived. I have seen 
Manuel perish amid the ungrateful desertion of his constit- 
uents and his friends. I have witnessed the death of La- 
fayette, who was not yet at the end of his green old-age, and 
who, by his majestic and simple rebuke, would have pre- 
vented the laws of September. I have seen Carrel fall in 
the spring-tide of life ; Carrel, the brilliant knight of de- 
mocracy, the flower of our hopes, the pen and the sword of 
the national party. I have seen extinguished Garnier-Pages, 
who, had he sooner quitted the vitiated air of the Chamber, 
and the deadly agitation of our fruitless struggles, would 
have recovered his strength and health beneath the milder 
climate of the south and in the repose of study. 

And I, the obscure companion of these illustrious men, I 
can only depict and admire them. 1 will begin with you 
Garnier-Pages, and I owe you this homage ; for you are now 
no more, and the dead are. so soon forgotten I for, besides, 
you loved me and were as unwilling to separate from me, 
as I would be to ever separate from you ! for there was not 
one of your thoughts which was not mine : like you, I dis- 
dained to accept honors or power ; like you, I loved the peo- 
pie ; like you, I expected reform, and we had no need of 
communicating to one another these sentiments, or of ex- 
pressing these opinions. We formed together wishes so sin- 
cere and so ardent for the union of all the patriots, for the 
aggrandizement of our beloved France, for the amelioration 
of the condition of the poor, and for the definitive triumph 
of democracy ! Yes, yours was a great intellect. Gamier- 
Pages ! yes, yours was a noble heart ! you understood lib- 
erty, you knew how it should be loved ! more than this, you 
knew how it should be served ! I shall sec you no more, 
you whom I had left so full of life ! and when I return to the 

14* 



162 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

Chamber, I sliall find you no more at the extremity of our 
Folitary bench ! 

Attacked myself, far away from you, by a malady not so 
destructive as yours, I have been unable to receive your 
latest breathings and pay you the duty of a faithful friend- 
ship ; but may these lines which I consecrate to you, and 
which flattery does not dictate, preserve your name from 
that flight of time which passes on and sweeps us along, and 
render you still dearer to our hearts and more regretted in 
our memory ! 

Garnier-Pages had the good fortune of not undergoing, as 
a member of parliament, that trial almost always fatal of the 
passage through several governments. Had he been deputy 
when the Revolution of July broke out, would he have, as 
so many others have done, exceeded the limits of his com- 
mission ? Would he have quitted the battle-field to go pil- 
lage the dead ? Would he have lost, under the touch of 
power, that political virginity which he kept to the last with 
a continence so exemplary ? I do not think so. Garnier- 
Pages had the rarest of courages in a country where all 
have personal bravery, he had the bravery of conscience. 
He would, in case of need, have sacrificed more than his 
life, he would have sacrificed his popularity ; and this is 
what I particularly esteem him for, for I should make little 
account of the orator or the writer, who could not, upon occa- 
sion, resist the prejudices and the precipitation of his own 
party. Truth should be spoken to friends still more than to 
enemies, and he who courts popularity at any rate, is but a 
coward, a demagogue or a blockhead. 

Simple in manners, of upright life, and a democrat austere 
without being extravagant ; faithful to his principles, sin- 
cere, disinterested, generous, inoffensive ; such was the man 
in the moral and political aspect. As orator, he excelled, 
by the sage economy of his plan, the simpleness of his dia- 
lectics and the mgenious quickness of his repartees. He 
was deficient perhaps in that elevated, copious and ample 
vigor, which sustains the discourse, and leaves the adversary 



GARNIER-PAGES. 163 

no lime to retreat or respire beneath the pressure and the 
pourino- of its impetuous flow ; deficient also in that internal 
emotion which communicates itself to the auditory, because 
it is felt by the orator himself; in that imagination which 
gives body to thought, and which has characterized all the 
great masters of the divine art of expression ; in fine, in that 
vehemence, that oratorical action which appertains to the 
power of the lungs and the coloration of the countenance. 

But in a serious assembly, in a government of business, 
the man truly eloquent is not he who has brilliancy, passion, 
tears in the very voice, but he who discusses best. But 
Garnier-Pages was a man of discussion. He was reason 
itself, spiced with wit. He had a talent completely parlia- 
mentary. He said but just what he meant to say, and, like 
an expert navigator, he steered his words' and his ideas 
through the shoals v/hich beset him on every side, not only 
without going to wreck, but without ever running' aground. 

Men in assemblages, parliamentary or popular, love what 
dazzles, what moves, what startles, what captivates, them. 
They do not enough take account of the justness of the 
thoughts, the propriety of the terms, the connection of the 
discourse. Garnier-Pages did not charm the frivolous, but 
he pleased the grave, for his speeches had more of the solid 
than the brilliant. He did not attend so much to the rapidity 
of his ideas as to their sequence, nor to the pomp of the 
words as to the things the words expressed. His discussion 
was compact and substantial. He deduced his propositions 
from each other, beginning with the principal, to reach the 
secondary, and his reasonings fell into the utmost compres- 
sion and unity, without the least confusion. I do not hesi- 
tate to say — and in this particular, I will, I think, be allow- 
ed to judge — that Garnier-Pages was one of the best dialec- 
titians of the Chamber. 

His familiar conversation abounded in observations pointed 
and epigrammatic without being wounding. He sparkled 
with gayety and wit. The oratorical immodesty which, 
in others, were superciliousness, in him was turned into 



164 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

naivete. Returned to his seat, he weakened sometimes, by 
his jesting, the impression which he had made in the tri- 
bune by his elevated reason. But the light Frenchman, 
can he refrain from banter and laughter, even in the height 
of danger, even at the hour of death ? 

Garnier-Pages, like all politicians, exaggerated the im- 
portance of the medium in which he acted. Where there 
were but a few scattered individuals, Garnier-Pages would 
imagine he saw a party. He magnified, with the eye of a 
wolf, the microscopic slimness of the Extreme Left. 

Ill at ease upon a narrow and ruinous ground which was 
failing him on all sides, he desired to show that the power- 
lessness of his position was not owing to want of power in 
the man, and he set himself to study, to expound, with in- 
defatigable ardor, the subjects of finance and political econ- 
omy. Thus it is that he passed night and day in delving 
into the vast and arid question of rent. His two discourses 
have made an epoch, and he may be said to have exhausted 
the subject. A perfect perspicuity of exposition, a remark- 
able sureness of judgment, a profound knowledge of details, 
a clear and vigorous argumentation, a sustained skill, a 
moderation of ideas, a circumspection of language, a point- 
ed promptness of reply, never enough to be praised — such 
were the qualities that held captive during several hours, the 
attention of the Chamber the most inattentive on earth, and 
which so impressed his very adversaries, that they were 
heard to mutter on leaving the session : — Young orator of 
Immense promise ! future minister of finance — of the de- 
mocracy ! 

In the discussion of the Bureaus, he spoke upon every 
subject, little, but well, seasonably, clearly, practically, with- 
out phrases and without pretension, without anger and with- 
out abuse ; and ministers had not an antagonist more prompt, 
peremptory and embarrassing. 

Garnier-Pages and Guizot have been, in our day, the two 
only deputies who were in a condition to unite, to discipline 
and to conduct a party. Odillon-Bavrot is too abstract; Man- 



G A R N I E R - P A G E S . 165 

guiii too frivolous, Thiers too careless, SauberL too hot- 
headed, Lamartine too vague, Dupin loo mercurial, and the 
others have either not the will, or, not the power. I do not 
say that Garnier-Pages and Guizot were m©n of intrigue, 
but I say they were men of ability. Both were active and 
energetic ; both well-informed in the personal statistics of 
their troops ; both consummate tacticians ; both capable of 
assigning to each one the reason which should determine 
him ; both employing unexpected stratagems ; both in the 
Chamber, in the bureau, in the associations, elsewhere, any- 
where, oppressed, possessed with the yearning to act, to state 
the question, to merge dissidences, to coalesce opinions, to 
organize the affair, and take the leadership themselves. 
Both were excellent leaders of Opposition, if Garnier-Pages 
had a little more of the gravity of Guizot, and if Guizot 
had something more of the dexterity of Garnier-Pages. 

But, what is no difficult matter indeed, M. Guizot leads, 
with lash uplifted, his band of obedient school-boys, while 
the Extreme Left is impatient of the curb, discontented, mu- 
tinous and almost indisciplinable. As they do not care to 
be simple soldiers, and each would be an officer, every one 
has the pleasure of obeying and commanding himself, pro- 
vided that he can come to an understanding with himself, a 
thing which does not always happen. And then does not 
the Extreme Left pride itself upon belonging to no one, and 
offering no systematical opposition ? Just so ; how pro- 
foundly shrewd ! Make no systematic opposition to others 
who will make you a systematic ministerialism, and you 
may well flatter yourselves with having achieved magnifi- 
cent things ! Isolate yourselves, break your ranks, fire at 
random, while the ministry, backed by the dark masses of the 
Centre, pour upon you the vollies of their compact battalions. 
This is well-disciplined opposition ! this is admirable tactic ! 

Either I am mistaken, or from the nature of his talent, 
Garnier-Pages would have made a good minister. But 
think not I would have favored him as candidate, and been 
impatient to paint him, with a red portfolio under his arm, 



166 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

and his collar embroidered with gold. I merely say he 
would have had the talent, I do not say he would have had 
the ambition. 

Yes, Garnier-Pages had all the capacities requisite to a 
minister : a rapidity of glance which goes straight to the 
depths of things ; a judgment never misled by imagina- 
tion ; a dialectic animated, exact and cogent ; an intellect 
fruitful of resources, prompt in expedients, comprehensive 
in organization, active and persevering in means. 

In like manner, in a few years Garnier-Pages, had he 
wished it, might have placed himself at the head of the bar. 
He possessed all the qualities of the advocates of our day, 
as much perhaps as those of the orator : a plodding penetra- 
tion, a profound knowledge of the law, a marvellous facility 
of argumentation, a power of natural and instant retort, a 
logical connection of thought, a great solidity of judgment. 

What surprised me most in him was his eminent aptitude 
for business, an aptitude such that M. Thiers himself would 
not have surpassed him. For if Thiers saw more quickly 
and farther, Garnier-Pages saw more justly. I do not, I 
own, much admire that light suppleness of speech and 
mind which consists in skirmishing around the benches of 
the ministers, and covering, roughening their skin with 
stings and pimples. These are refinements and subtleties 
which are not always comprehended by the public, ill ini- 
tiated in the falsehoods and synonymes of the parliamentary 
jargon. 

I prefer more nerve and earnestness in the discourse, and 
I think it necessary to know how to stop, when one has no- 
thing to say. But the pleaders, in all parties, are as exact- 
ing as the litigants. If you do not speak, they say you be- 
tray them. If you speak, they say you have made a bad 
defencte. It never enters their head that it is their cause 
that is worth nothing, and not their advocate. 

It cannot be too often repeated, since the Revolution of 
July, there has never been a systematic Opposition ; never 
recognized and regular chiefs of the combat ; but merely 



GARNIER-PAGES. 167 

soldiers quaintly accoutred in all sorts of armor, fortuitous 
and miscellaneous aggregations of sharp-shooters. I would 
add; since I am in train of frankness, that the democratic 
party has its inconsistencies quite as well as other parties ; 
and were I to perform its autopsy, I could show with how 
many disorders its poor system is shattered. 

There are those who would be content to change once- 
more a king, to try if that would not do perhaps better. 
Others are immediately for a republic. Others wish it 
equally, but not so soon. The latter would have the coun- 
try fairly consulted, what has never yet been done, and the 
matter decided by a majority of the citizens. 

The truth is that there is not in the Chamber a single 
deputy who is consistent in any one of his opinions. Ask 
rather the ministerialists, the Third- Party-men, and the Dy- 
nasties if they think themselves really to represent the coun- 
try : they will tell you the thing is evident, since the coun- 
try has not remonstrated against their charter and their laws, 
and that silence gives consent. 

To this I would reply in turn, that the Turks do not take 
it into their heads to remonstrate against the firmans 
of his Highness the Sultan Mahomet, a thing which does 
not at all prove that the Turks are free, nor that they have 
the smallest relish for the regime of the bastinado and the 
sack. This is, in fact, a very pretty dilemma. If you do 
not remonstrate, you are taken to consent ; but if you 
do remonstrate, you are incarcerated provisionally in the 
Conciergerie, whence you are led in the company of thieves, 
to be escorted in the company of gendarmes, to the prison 
of Clairvaux, where, lodged between four walls, you are at 
liberty, if you have the least inclination, to remonstrate as 
loud and as long as you please. Very honest governments, 
and very truthful representations are those governments and 
representations of the " silence gives consent .'" 

Ask now the Legitimists, who take the oath in the religious 
sense, if they feel quite at ease in placing their sworn hand 
in that of Louis-Philippe, while their hearts are at Goritzs ; 



168 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

they will answer you bravely, that they take their seats in 
virtue of the sovereignty of the people. 

To this I would in turn reply that, to invoke the sove- 
reignty of the people, it would be necessary to begin by re- 
cognizing it ; that one cannot serve two masters, adore two 
gods, call himself the subject of two kings, hold at the same 
time to two contrary principles — to legitimacy and to usur- 
pation. All the explanations in the world, you see, will not 
cure that forced position of its defects of precision and 
logic. 

Finally, ask the men of the Extreme Left if they do not 
feel some compunction in taking the oath : they will reply 
that a political oath is a mere formality ; that it obliges 
neither to serve nor to love this person or that ; that it binds 
no more towards prince, charter and laws, the deputies who 
take it against their will, than the people who do not take it 
at all ; and if you insist, if you ask why they pretend to make 
— they whom the country has not appointed — the laws 
which bind the country, they will answer that these laws 
would be still worse if they had not a hand in them. 

To this 1 would again reply, that the excuse extenuates 
the fact, but does not alter it, and that the organical faith- 
lessness of the representation is not cancelled by the neces- 
sity of the consequences. 

This explains why it is that, as 1 have said, there is not 
a single deputy, of whatever hue of opinion, who is not 
anti-logical, and why that Chamber, which contains indi- 
vidually so many and distinguished talents, is so faded in 
color, so lax in fibre, so tremulous in every limb, so wasted, 
so exhausted, so faint, that it has not even the force of abor- 
tion, not having the force of production. 

In fact, all the parties, without exception, are untrue to 
the great principle of the sovereignty of the people, and in 
consequence each party is untrue to its own principles. I 
affirm that there is nothing in the world more false or more 
stupid than such a position. Who has not beheld the puri- 
tans, and Garnier-Pages first amongst them, take incredible 



GARNIER-PAGES. 169 

pains, wring their hands in the muteness of pantomime, 
twist and turn themselves in a thousand oratorical contor- 
sions, to intimate at half-voice that a different system would 
have done better? But what is the use of these efforts of 
style, these synonymes, these parliamentary feats of rheto- 
ric ? Is it hoped to delude the men of abuse ? Their ears 
are long and keen. They perk up at the least word that 
tickles them. A system of government, moreover, is not 
to be modified by an oratorical allusion. Give me twenty 
lines of a newspaper, and I will say more upon the subject 
tlian the finest speech, of an hour's length. 

Let there be no expectation then from the Chambers 
present or future. They are and will always be what 
they always have been, ministerial — ministerial, on any 
terms, filled, from floor to roof, with salaried functionaries, 
stationary when not retrograde, the sport of every idle fear, 
impotent for good, prodigal of our money, worthy offspring, 
in a word, of the electoral monopoly ; they have done 
nothing, and will do nothing, for social progress. They 
have not repealed, and will not repeal, the laws of Septem- 
ber. They have not organized, and will not organize, 
labor. They will die one after another of impotence and 
senility, and it will be always to begin anew, until every 
Frenchman shall have a voice in the electoral colleges. 

One day, that radical Left, now so silent and cold, will 
shake off the trammels of this monopoly. One day, from 
the fertilizing springs of universal sufTrage, vv'ill arise the 
orators of independent brow and whose burning words shall 
diffuse around them warmth and life. One day, the people 
themselves will lay, by the hands of their real representa- 
tives, the broad foundations of the temple of liberty. But 
for the present, without being as grand as it might be, the 
task of the Opposition is sufficiently glorious. 

It has a right to claim all the consequences of the princi- 
ple of popular sovereignty : abroad, independence ; at home, 
liberty, equality, instruction, economy, reform. What is a 
deputy who would wrap himself up in the taciturnity of 

15 



1 70 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

spleen and despair ? What is the soldier who would hide 
himself in his tent, instead of fighting in open day, at the 
head of the camp ? It is the duty of the men of right to 
spread the truth before the men of abuse, even though the 
latter should trample the seed under foot. Contempt, inter- 
ruptions, calumnies, insult, they should bear all fbr their 
country. If the country does not comprehend them, does 
not sustain them, does not remember them, so much the 
worse for the country, and not for them. 

It must therefore not be said, with a publicist of my 
acquaintance, and thanks to me, well known,* that he can- 
not improvisate ; that he has a bad memory ; that the mur- 
murings of the Centre would drown his voice ; that it would 
have no echo; that written discourses are cold, ariificial, 
fit to be read, not to be heard ; that the vanity of the writer 
would suffer from the feebleness of the orator ; that the 
writer presents results, and the orator developments ; that 
the writer is fastidious, if he repeats himself, and the orator 
not understood, if he does not ; that thus the qualities of the 
publicist and of the orator exclude each other, and various 
other pretexts. 

The question is not, sir, whether your vanity would 
suffer by not uttering the truth in fine language, but whether 
you are not bound to utter it in what terms soever ; whether 
you ought to take less concern for your reputation than for 
the good of your country. Doubtless, if you have nothing 
v*'orth saying, by all means hold your tongue ; but if your 
conscience oppresses you, discharge it. Keep always ad- 
vancing, always in quest of new knowledge, and cleave 
with your prow the unexplored ocean of the future. Truth 
is like the long wake which the steamboat leaves behind it, 
whose orbs, in expanding, are rolled gradually to either 
bank and end by enveloping the whole surface of the river. 
Is it that you imagine that, perchance, you will not be pun- 
ished as well for your silence as for your speech, that your 
house has not been already marked with chalk by the 
* The Author himself ?—T.'s N. 



GARNIER -PAGES. 171 

sbires of power, and that you will not sooner or later pass 
beneath the forks of proscription ! Go then and rejoice, if 
you are destined to suffer for the good cause. Know, sir, 
that the field of liberty has need for a long time yet of 
beinw watered with the tears and the blood of its defenders ! 

o 

No, the members of the Extreme Left cannot remain with 
folded arms, while society, impelled by a mysterious and 
powerful force, is marching towards a better, but inexpli- 
cable, future. 

At all events, quite different is the duty of the writer, 
who lives in the absolute, from the duty of the deputy, who 
lives in the relative. The one holds his commission but 
of himself, the other but of his constituents ; the one 
chooses his position, the other accepts it ; the one is the 
man of what is not yet, the other the man of what is actu- 
ally ; the one deals always with theories, the other always 
with applications. 

Garnier-Pages, like a shrewd politician, comprehended 
that in a monopoly Chamber, it is requisite to speak the whole 
truth, and not to demand but what is possible ; that, by a 
skilful laborer, the seeds of progress may be brought to 
germinate in the most ungrateful soil ; that a deputy is not 
master of refusing a proffered amelioration, however small 
it may be ; that the fruits of violence are always bitter and 
rickety, and fall before being ripe ; in fine, that the weapons 
of argument are more sure and more victorious in a free 
country than the resort to musketry and bayonets.* 

Yes, politics should not resemble those scourges of hea- 
ven, those ravagers of nations who are heralded along their 
paths by terror and despair, who batter down the temples 
of religion without rebuilding them, and the institutions 
of society without re-constituting them, who make around 
them a desert, and are delighted but amid vengeance, ruins 
and graves. If it is not permitted as yet to build an edifice 
regular, new and complete, we must at feast cut the stones 

♦ This paragraph offers a sufficiently exact resume of the policy of 
O'Connell.— T.'s N. 



172 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

and bring them upon the ground. Each season lias its 
work, every age advances a step. The legislator should 
imitate nature, who never takes repose, who repairs and re- 
produces herself unceasingly, who is ever decorating her- 
self afresh with new harvests and flowers, and who draws 
vitality from death itself. At the present day, the end of 
every statesman who comprehends his sacred mission, should 
be the amelioration of the condition of the human species. 
Every effort of the law-maker, which had not this tendency, 
would be anti-moral, anti-philosophical, anti-religious, bar- 
ren, impotent, negative, without object and without excuse. 

If it is not allowable to organize the great bases of gov- 
ernment, nor even to discuss them, there is still much good 
to be done in the secondary questions. The Charter has not 
sprung forth, one fair August morning, from the brains of 
MM. Berard and Dupin. These gentlemen have not, that I 
know, invented the jury, the freedom of worship, the liberty 
of the press, the responsibility of ministers, nor even the 
equality of taxation. We, too, are conservatives of this and 
whatever else of the kind there is to be conserved in the 
Charter, and we defy the keenest hunters of office, of power, 
salaries, or sinecures, to love more prodigiously the good 
things of the Charter than we do. There is therefore still 
much to be said respecting this excellent personage, the 
Charter, without giving ground for reprehension or cause 
of pain. 

What matters it, moreover, whether in that dull and deso- 
late Chamber the Extreme Left speak out or not ? What 
matter whether it be listened to or disdained l What mat- 
ter that Lafayette die, that Carrel fall, that Garnier-Pages 
disappear ? The men depart, the principle remains. These 
two hundred years, and throughout all Europe, despotism 
has in vain cut down with musketry and cannon, the ranks 
of the people ; the voids fill up, the battalions thicken, the 
land of democracy smiles in fertility, the generations grow 
up full of hope and ardor, and the battle recommences on 
every side, with certain triumph in the prospect. 



GARNIER-PAGES. 173 

No, the sovereignty of the nations, froni whicli all ema- 
nates and to which all returns, will not perish, unless the 
people be put to death by the people and Europe made one 
immense solitude. The sovereignty of nations is the prin- 
ciple of liberty, based upon equality political, civil and re- 
ligious. It is the principle of order founded upon respect 
for the rights of all and of each. It is the most beautiful 
of theories only because it is the truest. It is the most con- 
solatory, only because it leaves no misfortune without suc- 
cor, no injustice Vv'ithout redress. It is the most sublime, 
only because it is the expression of the general will. It is 
the most prolific, only because it is the fountain of all per- 
fectibility. It is the most natural, only because it is no 
other than the law of the majority, who, all unconsciously, 
govern the free societies. It is the noblest, but because it 
is the only one which answers to the dignity of human na- 
ture. It is the most legitimate, only as being the sole theory 
which accounts for the alliance of power with, liberty, and 
which makes the one respectable and the other possible. It 
is the most reasonable, only because the presumption is that 
several are right rather than one, and all than several. It 
is the holiest, only because it is the most perfect realization 
of the symbolical equality of all men. It is the most phi- 
losophic, but because it dispels the prejudices (^f aristocracy 
and of divine right. It is the most logical, but because there 
is not one serious objection which it cannot resolve, nor a 
form of government to which it cannot adapt itself, without 
altering its principle. In fine, it is the most magnificent, 
but because from the immense trunk of the sovereignty of 
nations, spring at once all the branches of the social tree, 
charged with sap and with foliage, with fruits and flowers. 

15* 



174 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 



CASIMIR-PERIER. 

The Court, as yet ill fortified within and without, moved 
gropingly along the way of its infant establishment. Rid at 
last of Lafayette and of Lafitte, whom it had loved so much 
and pressed so often to its heart, it found itself placed be- 
tween the adventurers of the doctrinism and the tremblers of 
the commonalty : it cast its eyes upon Casimir-Perier. 

His immense wealth gave him that sort of apparent in- 
dependence wliich elevates a man above the suspicions of 
corruption, and which always imposes upon the vulgar. 
He attracted the Legitimists by the secret predilection of 
Charles X. for his person, and he could excite no distrust in 
Louis-Philippe, having never served another master. His 
impassioned dialectic rendered him marvellously fit to strug- 
gle against the Opposition, man to man, invective to invec- 
tive. He was a personage of action and vivid retort, en- 
dowed with more parliamentary resolution than personal 
courage, always ready to take the tribune by storm, and tak- 
ing it in fact. There was nothing even to the height of his 
stature, his quick and imperious step, his eyes hidden under 
the thick lashes and always full of a red and glowing flame, 
which did not complete the wholeness of his circumstantial 
superiority. He seemed made for the command and for the 
presidency of the Council, and there was none, not even the 
conqueror of Toulouse, who thought of contesting it with 
him. The Court, the burgess tremblers, the peers of legiti- 
macy, the sharpers of the Bourse, and the sheeplike majority 
of the Chamber, all threw themselves at the feet of Casimir- 
Perier to implore him to take the helm of State, to guide and 
save them. 

Here, I must honestly beg the reader not to examine the 
portrait I am about to paint, but with a degree of distrust, 
of reserve at least. I am sincere, but I am not impartial. 



CASIMIR-PERIER. 175 

Casimir-Pericr deceived my liberal hopes. He violently 
attacked my character. It may well be that, in this situa- 
tion of mind, I have, in depicting him, now some years ao-o, 
mixed too mut^h black upon my easel. But it is necessary 
on the other hand, if I would not lie, to say what I have 
seen. I then drew, besides, but the sick man, a prey to keen 
and internal suffering, and to embarrassments of government 
and politics well capable of disturbing the thoughts and dis- 
ordering the judgment. 

These precautions taken against the possible error of my 
appreciation, I proceed. 

Casimir-Perier exhibited towards his last days, a tempes- 
tuous energy which sapped his strength, and was carrying 
him rapidly to the tomb. He stirred up, he inflamed, with- 
out knowing it, without willing it perhaps, and by a sort of 
convulsive sympathy, all these bad passions which ever 
slumber in the corner of the most tranquil souls. His voice 
was the signal to both parties to rush upon one another, and 
you would have taken the Chamber for an unchained mad- 
house rather than an assembly of sober legislators. 

The sessions at that period were somewhat like those of 
the Convention, with the exception of the theatric grandeur 
of the events, and the tragic end of the actors. The minis- 
ters and the Centres were afraid of themselves and of 
each other ; it is an amusement like any other. Instead of 
action there was abuse; and the Chamber presented the 
spectacle of a reign of terror in miniature. 

Fear has always been and ever will be, of all parliamen- 
tary springs, the most energetic and perhaps the most effi- 
cient. It acts upon the women, the children, the aged, and 
upon the pusillanimous deputies, who, in dangers, real or 
imaginary, flock tremblingly together. Add to their real 
fears, those they feign : for there is upon the ministerial 
benches a crowd of timorous pigeons, always in a flutter to 
get behind the altar and shelter themselves under the wing 
of the god who reigns and who governs for the time being. 

Casimir-Perier should be seen in these moments, seen 



176 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

face to face as I have seen him, to paint him faithfully. 
His lofty stature was already bowed. His beautiful and 
majestic countenance was altered with shade and wrinkles. 
His cheeks -were sunken, his eyes rolled a fire mixed with 
blood. His words burned like the fever he felt, and he had 
fits of derangement. He abused, lashed, tyrannized the 
majority quite the same as the minority, and by his conduct 
astounded the other ministers. There was no distinction at 
that time of Third-party, of pure ministerialists, and of Doc- 
trinarians. Casimir-Perier left the fractions of the majority 
no time to recognize and count themselves. He brought 
them together, he compressed them rigorously under his 
crisped fingers, and then dispatched pell-mell to the combat, 
Dupin, Thiers, Guizot, Barthe, Jaubert, Jacqueminot and 
Keratry. He himself wrestled in the estrade of the tribune, 
with the deputy Jousselin. Another time, an officer had to 
be sent to whisper to him that his garments were in disorder. 
So much had the preoccupations of the parliamentary strug- 
gle absorbed the entire man. 

The majority did not obey him by conviction, opposition 
or system ; it rallied mechanically to the will, to the ire 
of this maniac. It imitated his attitude, his gesture, his 
tone of voice, his anger. Like him, it leaped, stamped, 
howled and wrung its arms. But when, after several fits 
of parliamentary frenzy, Casimir-Perier had attained the 
paroxysm of his fury, his head grew dizzy ; he sunk ex- 
hausted, shattered down, and giving up the ghost. 

Since his death, these intelligent and peremptory tran- 
sports passed for firmness, and two or three phrases, always 
the same, which were prompted to him, and which he re- 
peated without comprehending, got him the reputation of 
genius. The priesthood of the Juste-milicu concealed the 
secret of their knaveries in the hollow of that idol, and 
gilded it from head to foot to captivate the homage of the 
vulgar. 

We owe the dead no more than truth ; but this is due to 
them in eulogy as well as in criticism, and I feel here the 



CASIMIR-PERIER. 177 

necessity of retouching some features of my former portrait. 
Thus while now repeating that Casimir-Perier was harsh, 
irascible, imperious, without taste, without reading, without 
literary instruction, without philanthropy, without philoso- 
phy, I will say that he also possessed three great and prin- 
cipal qualities of the statesman, ardor and vivacity of con- 
ception, decision of command, force and persistence of 
will. 

The friends of liberty who would not be ungrateful will 
always distinguish two periods in his life ; the one glorious, 
his career of representative ; the other fatal to France as 
to himself, his career of minister. The Revolution of July 
owes him too much in its early struggles not to praise him, 
and he has done it too much prejudice afterwards not to 
merit its blame. 

This personage has been the representative the most 
vehement and perhaps the most sincere of the old liberal- 
ism. He had it not merely upon his lips like his ministerial 
successors, but also in his heart. But, whether blindness, 
or force of habit, he was unable to comprehend, that there 
is, between legitimacy and the popular sovereignty, all the 
depth of an abyss. 

I do not see that the present benches of the Opposition 
possess an orator of the stamp of Casimir-Perier. Not one, 
whose penetration is so sagacious, whose eloquence so 
simple, so ready. Casimir-Perier was exercised in the 
animated contentions of the Restoration. Scarce did his 
wary eye see Villele put the finger to the trigger, than his 
own charge was off and in the bosom of the man of power. 
He plunged headforemost into the melee; he marched 
right to the minister and sat beside him on his bench of 
torture ; he pressed him around tlie loins, he worried him 
with questions, he overwhelmed him with apostrophes, with- 
out leaving him time to recover or to 'breathe ; he held him 
obstinately upon his seat, and interrogated him authorita- 
tively as if he was his judge. We are a quarrelsome peo- 
ple, more hardy to attack than patient to defend : we like 



178 REVOLUTION OF J U I>-Y . 

aggression. Perhaps that would fail another, which has 
so well succeeded in the case of Perier ! but it suited the 
man. 

While Royer-Collard gave his recriminations the philo- 
sophic elevation of an axiom, Casimir-Perier was ciphering 
his argumentations. With Lafitte and Casmir-Perier, 
those anatomists of budgets, those seekers, those investiga- 
tors, those rummage rs, those discussers of funds secret and 
disguised, it was not possible, as is the complaint now-a- 
days, to slip, into the chapter of criminal justice, the 
dowery of a beloved daughter or the cachmere shawl of 
an adored wife ; in the purchase of military beds, the price 
of a boudoir and a silken divan ; in the rough repairs of a 
partition-wall, the decoration of a dining-hall ; in the pur- 
chase of a counting-desk, the expenses of a pleasure-trip ; 
in the re-establishment of the fathers of La Trapp, the grati- 
fication of a cook ; in fine in the expenditures upon the 
orphans of the Legion of Honor, the pension of an opera- 
girl. 

Casimir-Perier had, during the Restoration, been engaged 
in speculations upon a vast scale, and there is not so much 
difference as is commonly thought, between a great finan- 
cier and a great administrator. He had a practised apti- 
tude for finance, and understood it in theory and detail. He 
saw the point of contestation better than other bankers, and 
almost with the promptness of an advocate. He introduced 
into the affairs of the State the same order which reigned 
in his own.* He possessed comprehensiveness of view, 

* This, as a fact, has not, I think, been commonly the case. On 
the contrary, the greatest statesmen have often been among the least 
prudent managers of their private affairs. View the two great rival 
statesmen of England, in the last century, in this character. Even 
Burke, a greater far than either, though brought up in the school of 
adversity, was very little better as a domestic economist. A like im- 
putation is sometimes made upon the first of our own statesmen, 
Webster. The instances are without number. Indeed they consti- 
tute the principle. For the breadth of intellect and the elevation of 



C ASI xMIR- P ER I E R . 179 

and in his character, in his intellect, in his habits, in his 
person, had that absoluteness, that peremptoriness, that de- 
cision which is perhaps indispensable to a minister of the 
Interior, in order to overcome the doubts and hesitations of 
prefects and commissioners, to get rid of the courtiers and 
office-seekers, to cut short the perplexities of detail, to 
sweep away the encumbrance of arrears, to open and con- 
clude great undertakings, and to conduct resolutely the af- 
fairs and interests of France. 

Doubtless, he cannot be too severely reproached for hav- 
ing inflicted upon the Revolution of July the violence of 
a transient reaction ;* but had he lived, he would, I believe, 
have returned to the normal ground of the Charter. He 
could have never imagined that a revolution was brought 
about merely to paint yellow the shutters of the representa- 
tive shop. He would not have erected the Chamber of 
Peers into a court of provost, and recommended, as did the 
Doctrinarians, to expose the naked head of the proscribed to 
the burning sun of the equator. He would have battered 
down the barriers of the Dardanelles, launched our fleets, 
marched our armies, emptied the treasury, rather than suf- 
fer an insult to France, a spot upon our flag. Born a great 

soul which qualify to conduct the affairs and the destinies of a nation 
seem to be incompatible with the narrow-eyed minuteness and the 
mercantile spirit, which give to personal concerns their system and 
their success. 

* The chief endeavor of M. Perier's Ministry appears to have 
been " to keep France at peace with Europe, and thereby to make 
commerce and manufactures flourish, to establish civil liberty, and re- 
press the military spirit ; and secondly, to render the government more 
firm." The Opposition reproached him with ignominiously court- 
ing the favor of the absolute monarchs, with having deprived France 
of the honorable and elevated position due to her in the European 
System, with being unwilling to follow up frankly the principles of 
the '• July Revolution," and with " having sacrificed Italy to Austria, 
and Poland to Russia." But Perier's administration was of great 
value to France, on account of his financial abilities — for France had^ 
not yet recovered from the exhaustion produced by her protracted 
wars. 



180 C A S I M I R - P E R I E R . 

personage on the birth-day of the dynasty, he knew by ex- 
perience how kings are made and of what stuff. He was 
not a man to be flattered into a prostration of his indomitable 
will at the feet of a master. He would not therefore be 
content to be a nominal President, a Comarilla^ valet, a 
train-bearer of the commandants of the wardrobe, and leav- 
ing Royalty to reign amid the splendors of its gold upon its 
solitary throne, he would have stopped it at the legal limits 
of the government, saying : " Thus far, but no farther !" 

* A nickname of the Louis-Pliilippe dynasty. 



S AUZ E T. 181 



SAUZET. 

PRESIDENT OF THE CHAMBER OF DEPUTEES. 

The orator does not exhibit himself in profile, like the 
writer, but in full face. He attires, gesticulates, declaims 
upon a stage,' before a number of spectators, who survey him 
as we do a mimic, from head to foot. The writer is account- 
able but for his intellect. The orator is held responsible for 
his figure. ? 

M. Sauzet is somewhat effeminate and negligent 'in his 
personal habits. He is not muscular nor well set. His 
complexion is fair and slightly colored ; his countenance is 
open, and his blue eyes are full of sweetness. He is a mix- 
ture of the man and the woman. 

Simple, easily led, not sufficiently bearded and tempered 
with vigor for great effort. A good sort of man, and who 
must be put to bed by his wife, if he is married, and by the 
servant, if he is not. 

M. Sauzet fidgets and waddles about like a child, so that 
it is impossible to seize his outline, and it will be necessary 
to wait till the perfected daguerreotype come to my aid to 
keep him quiet, at least for a moment, in the field of the came- 
ra-obscura. And then M. Sauzet too would perhaps like — 
they have all this failing — that I should make him a Demos- 
thenes. But it is not my fault, no more is it yours, reader, 
if the Demosthenes of the city of Canuts does not resemble 
completely the Demosthenes of the city of Minerva. 

When the Lyonese lawyer made his appearance in the 
Chamber, he carried constantly a smile upon his lips. Be 
it natural affability, or policy, he set himself to please every- 
body, and especially the ministers. He courted with fawn- 

IG 



182 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

ing gaze, one after the other, the melancholy figures on that 
bench of pain, whereon he grew impatient and fretful that 
he had not as yet a seat. 

M. Sauzet has wliat we call ojood natural advantacres, a 
sonorous voice, a pleasing countenance, a prompt intelli- 
gence, and a clear and easy elocution. His voice is ample, 
and perfectly audible throughout the Chamber. There are 
however some false notes in its intonation, and its flaQ-mnff 
cadences fall with the period. 

M. Sauzet is mild, polite, affable, moderate. He courts 
the good-will of others and imparts to them his own. There 
is in his face, his sentiments, and his language, something I 
know not wiiat of honest and engaging which charms and 
attracts you. With a mind better furnished with ideas and 
of a more practical cast, he has nearly the figurative style 
and cadenced modulation of another orator, the demi-god of 
poetry. He is M. de Lamartine made man. 

Memory is the principal agent of his eloquence. At the 
age of ten, he used to recite, word for word, a chapter of 
Telemachus, which he had read but once. He can, while 
speaking, suppress entire fragments of his discourse, and 
substitute new portions, which he inserts into the same tis- 
sue, as proporly as if ho had fastened them with pins. 

Flis intellect is wrought to a point, and puns occur to him 
so familiarly in conversation, that, when he speaks in the 
tribune, he has to chase them away, as he would an impor- 
tunate fly that should keep buzzing at his ear. 

M. Sauzft is the type of the provincial orator. His pom- 
pous b'tyle is inflated rather than full. It pleases the ear, 
but does not reach the soul. He seems as if he had been 
spoiled by his practice in the Court of Assize. He squan- 
ders, by handfuls, the brilliant flowers of language, the 
modulations of harmony, rambling epithets and college met- 
aphors — an obsolete rhetoric, which has now scarce name 
or value in the commerce of political eloquence. 

It is not that I blame M. Sauzet for having recourse be- 



SAUZET. 183 

fore a jury, and in a Court of Sessions, to these pathetical 
means of saving the accused. That spectacle of a woman 
in tears who clasps the altars of mercy and of justice — those 
heart-rending cries of remorse — those young men about to 
be cut off in the bloom of life by the axe of the executioner, 
like the lilies of spring by the ploughshare — innocence 
struggling against the terrors of punishment — the dark un- 
certainties of the prosecution, those glimmerings of doubt 
that flit before you, now brightening, then expiring — those 
broken sighs, those muttering lips, those plaints, those im- 
plorings, those melting images of a young and helpless fam- 
ily asking back its father, and doomed to perish if he perish, 
or of an old man crowned with gray hairs, who throws him- 
self at your knees to expiate the involuntary crime of a 
misguided son ; — all this is drawn from nature, all this has 
been beautiful in its time, all this may still have an effect 
upon fancies easily moved, and sensible, like unsophisticated 
men, to the charm of public speaking and the exciting 
dramas of eloquence. 

But to deputies, to those men surfeited with intellectual 
delicacies, to those cloyed stomachs, we should present the 
viands of oratory but with fresh stimulants and fresh season- 
ings. It is not well that the spectators see too near the ma- 
chinery of the green-room, lest their illusion be dispelled. A 
discourse should not have too much pomp and savor of the 
stage. The great art, in a parliamentary orator, lies in his 
skill to conceal art. 

It is said that M. Sauzet has no principles : but where 
then, pray, is the practising advocate who has principles? 
When a man has, for twenty years of his life, been labor- 
ing indifferently in the cause of truth and of falsehood"; 
when he has been the habitual and hired protector and con- 
ceal(# of malice and fraud, it is difficult, it is impossible 
that he should have any fixity in his principles. 

The lawyers have always a stock of fine phrases respect- 
ing what they call their professional discretion. 



184 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

But, would you know what this discretion of a practising 
lawyer comes to ? Peter sues Paul ; he instantly takes a 
Qhaise, and drives post to the office of the most celebrated 
lawyer in the city, who says to him : " You have a better 
case than Paul." Paul, who started later, arrives ten min- 
utes after, at the office of the same advocate, who tells him : 
" You haye a better case than Peter ; but what can I do ? 
he was before you." I surely do not mean that the lawyer 
is the first-comer's man always, but almost always. 

It is well known that the lawyers carry in one of the 
pockets of their robe, the reasons for, and in the other, the 
reasons against either and every side. But they sometimes 
mistake the right pocket in the hurry of pleading, and this 
is why their conclusion is not always in very perfect accord 
with their exordium. They hardly know how to come to 
a decision, and are never very sure of their ground. If 
they press upon you with a huge argumentation, you may 
hold them in check by a quite triffing objection. To them 
everything presents a question, everything is an obstacle. 
Throw, under their whirling chariot-wheel, a grain of sand, 
they will climb down to inspect it, instead of passing it over. 

They will deny, with the sun before you, that it is day, 
and if you begin to laugh, they will undertake to convince 
you. 

Singular fact ! These men who, all their lives, have studied 
nothing but the laws, are forever in doubt about the laws. 

For them the law has always two meanings, two accepta- 
tions, a double language and a Janus face. 

They see less the causes than the effects, the spirit than 
the letter, the law than the fact, the principle than the applica- 
tion, and the plan than the details. 

A new government, monarchical, aristocratical, republi- 
can, or of whatever sort, ought to strive to gain the %rmy 
by honors, the commercial classes by security, and the 
people by justice : it need not concern itself about the law 
yers. It is all but certain to have them in its favor. 



S A U Z E T . 185 

The lawyers have the art of keeping up a revolution by 
their interminable speeching ; but it is never they who begin 
nor who finish it. 

There is no truth so clear that they do not tarnish, by dint 
of polishing it. There is no patience of ear they do not 
weary by the endless flux of their orations. There is no 
reasoning, be it ever so powerful and nervous, that does not 
lose in their hands, by dint of repetition, its elasticity and 
vigor. 

Do not hasten to think they will enter at once upon the 
subject, because you may have said to them : " Well, what 
do you wait for ; go on !" They must first arrange their 
rabat, they must fix their cap over the ear, they must truss 
up gracefully the flowing folds of their robe,* they must 
hem, they must spit, and they must sneeze. This done, they 
prelude like musicians who tune their violin, or dancino-. 
girls who practise their capers behind the curtain, or like 
the rope-dancers, making trial of their balancer. They keep 
bowing and turning to either side of them in their saluta- 
tions, and it takes them a large quarter-hour of oratorical 
precautions, of phrases, of periphrases, of circumlocutions, 
of turnings and windings, before they determine to say at 
last : Gentlemen of the Jury, the case is this. 

Let no one say to me : Are you not afraid to stir up against 
you this waspish race ? You have there taken in hand a 
pretty business, and truly, I admire your temerity ! Ad- 
mire nothing, for you know as well as I do, however bad 
may be my cause against the lawyers, I will find lawyers to 
plead it ; and I myself— is it that you think I am not equal 
to my own defence ? 

JVho, pray, could hinder me to paint them, with their 
various physiognomies, as they are, and as I see them ? 
This one, for example, this Ergaste, merited that I should 
draw his portrait at full length. But I have sought in vain 
under what standard and colors to class him. In what 

* Neither robe nor rabat is worn in this country, and only the for- 
mer in England. 

16* 



186 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

memorable parliamenlary action lias he taken any part ? If 
the debate respect material interests, Ergaste speaks and 
sheds light upon tlie subject from his stores of knowledge. 
If it be apolitical question — vast, fundamental, peremptory — 
he is silent as a statue. He seems to possess two qualities, 
contradictory of one another : by character he is concilia- 
tory, by talent he is aggressive. 

No matter : his physiognomy suits the fancy of my pen- 
cil. The sunny south beams in his burning glance. His 
hair waves gracefully and glossily, his voice of silvery 
distinctness vibrates upon my ear. Ergaste has the ges- 
tures, the attitude, the eye, the animation and the rapid 
impassionate movements of the orator. He does not ramble 
in his exordiums. He grapples at once with his subject 
and shakes it vigorously. His eloquence is nervous, and 
there is muscle and life in his discourses. Ergaste was 
born an orator. It has been his will to remain an 'advocate. 
Well, let him plead at the bar, let him plead still in the tri- 
bune, let him die an advocate ! 

This other is Cleophon, who perpetrates wit unintention- 
ally, by sheer naivete, and as others do a blunder. At the 
outset of his legislative career, this Norman advocate used 
to pump from the depths of his thorax, a voice which he 
inflated and inflated till it swelled into a roar. He poured it 
forth at random and tolled it as loudly as the cathedral bell 
of Rouen. He shook the old hall of the Palais Bourbon, 
which, to say truth, was not very solid, and the colleagues 
of Cleoplion raised their eyes, while he spoke, to the shiver- 
ing windows of the cupola, fearing it should tumble about 
their ears. 

The next has a keen and intellectual countenance, ^nd 
his eloquence flows from a spring, not from a cistern. But 
his attitudinizing is too studied, too ambitious. He does 
not enough forget the Court of Sessions, and speaks before 
the deputies, as if he was before a jury. Juries are gener- 
ally a sort of well-meaning men, natural, simple, somewhat 
credulous, confiding ; who open themselves to emotion, who 



SAUZET. 187 

invite it, who absolutely require it, and who allow them- 
selves to be taken and led captive by its influence. The 
deputies are, on the contrary, an artificial, cold, banter- 
ing, suspicious, heartless race, who resist all emotions by 
a sort of induration of the political lymph, rather than 
through wisdom. In them tlie pulso scarce beats, and to 
draw the blood demands the nicest adroitness. Here is no 
place for startling effects, or oratorical draperies, or high- 
flow n eloquence. To fix the attention of the auditory in a 
deliberative assembly, to keep it up, to suspend and then 
precipitate it and force it along with you, this is a grand 
art. It is the art of the consummate orator ; and Pherinte 
is but a tyro. 

Oronte spoils his exordiums by the fastidious superabun- 
dance of his oratorical preliminaries. You would say 
that he has always his pockets filled with flasks of per- 
fumery, for fear of offending the smell of his auditors 
when he advances to address them, and that he will not 
touch their hand but with gloves of the finest kid. Ah ! 
my God ! Be not so squeamish. Grasp and shake vigor- 
ously these hardened reprobates with gauntlets of iron, if 
you can, and until they cry out for mercy ! Do they give 
quarter to the people, they, who take them by the throat 
and plunder them of the best of their substance? 

Isocles is a man of probity, conscience, honesty, no one 
denies it. But, by an awkward contrast, his ideas are 
often trivial and his expressions inflated, whereas the for- 
mer should be elevated and the latter simple. Isocles has 
brought'to the tribune the vicious forms of the bar, and the 
extravagant gesticulation of the Court of Sessions. He 
takes the solemn intonation of a melo-dramatic hero, to re- 
late tiie smallest fact. He is moved to tears over the dis- 
asters of a mortgage. He gets into a towering passion 
about a question of bankruptcy. The bar is not always — • 
far from it — a good school of politics. The practice stifles 
all originality of thought. Lawyers by profession make, 
ordinarily, judges without decision and ministers v/ithout 



188 REVOLUTION OF JULY. - 

viev/s and without capacity, diffuse, hair-splitting, redun- 
dant, declamatory. They understand nothing of State 
affairs. It is but after an hour's exercise that they begin to 
warm, that the blood creeps into their face and some faith 
into their hearts. Still is it with much difficulty that they 
determine to come to any conclusion, and they would cheer- 
fully render thanks to the assembly which would permit 
them to remain suspended arms aloft and erect on tip-toe, 
between the pro and the con of the question. 

A government of sharpers would be a government with- 
out morality and withoiit economy. A government of 
soldiers would be a government without gentleness and with- 
out justice. A government of lawyers would be a govern- 
ment without conviction, without ideas, without principles 
and what is perhaps worse, without action. 

Unfortunately for himself, M. Sauzet has not put off the 
old man, his lawyer's gown. He empties out, good or bad, 
the whole contents of his sack. He knows not how to re- 
strain his intemperance of argument. He wants the skill 
to choose, to pick out his political topics. He pleads them 
all, except however those, mind you, which might compro- 
mise him with the majority. 

M. Sauzet is no writer. His manner is that of rhetori- 
cians, feeble and tumid. His logic — which is not the exact- 
est, does not proportion his consequences to their principle. 

M. Sauzet, whether from mental propensity, or imitation, 
or calculation, is of the school of Martignac. Less temper- 
ate, less graceful, less elegant, less adroit than his master, 
but more copious, more vehement, more pathetic, more pic- 
turesque. Like M. de Martignac, he parries with address, 
and steps aside from the lance of the antagonist. He does 
not suffer himself easily to be unhorsed, and slides to the 
ground rather than falls. Like Martignac, he continues 
still a worshipper of those representative forms and that hol- 
low and metaphysical constitutionalism which is called the 
balanced government of three powers. Like Martignac — • 
for a final point of resemblance — M. Sauzet resumes admi- 



SAUZET. 189 

rably the opinions of others, and acquits himself in the 
most intricate discussions, with a sagacity, a delicacy and 
a skill that have not been duly admired. 

With what profundity of science, with what solidity of 
sense, with what dialectic ability he has conducted the de- 
bate upon the law of Mines ! The more his language is 
pompous when he declaims, too pompous, the more it is sim- 
ple, elegant, and beautiful when he discusses. He over- 
looks no grave objection, and he appends the reply at the 
instant. He is never afraid of breaking through, because 
he knows where he is about to put his foot. He does not 
allow himself to be provoked to offensive personalities, nor 
does he substitute epigrams to arguments, or hypotheses to 
the realities of the question. His mind maintains all its 
firmness and all its presence, and his march is always pro- 
gressive, logical and steady. M. Sauzet may console him- 
self for the fall of his oratorical reputation. He will be, 
whenever he wishes, the first business orator of the Cham- 
ber, and what is there higher than this ? 

I am not surprised that he presided over the Council of 
State with so remarkable a superiority. He should have 
been left at the head of this great body of administrative 
magistracy. That was his talent, that was his place. 

I do not remember to have ever heard, since M. de Mar- 
tignac, a more intelligent and fluent reporter ; and M. Sau- 
zet owes this advantage to a union of the three qualities 
which constitute eminence in this line : namely, perspicuity, 
memory, and impartiality. 

1 have now balanced, I think with sufficient exactness, the 
defects and the excellencies of M. Sauzet, as an orator, as a 
president, and as a framer of reports ; and you will deem 
with me, reader, that I have assigned him a position still 
sufficiently handsome. But I should not find it equally easy 
to follow and excuse him in his political vagaries. 

Of M. Sauzet, I several years ago thus wrote : 

M. Sauzet is not decidedly either Legitimist, or Third- 
partyite, or Dynastic, or Republican. But he is at once a 



190 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

little of all this. He will take his seat by M. Berryer. He 
would have no objection to vote with M. Dupin. He will 
support the ministry of Odillon-Barrot, and he would not re- 
nounce entirely Garnier-Pages. He is one of those good, 
happy, and easy natures which heaven, in the treasures of 
its mercy, had reserved for the tempting experiments of our 
well-beloved monarch. 

M. Sauzet was not slow, in fact, to be taken as I had pre- 
dicted. He passed his arms through the long sleeves of the 
simar, and postured himself, as well as he could, in the 
chair of d'Augesseau. 

Afterwards, forced to quit the tassels of gold and er- 
mine, he slid into the train of M. Thiers, firing off squibs, 
as a boy his pop-gun, without attracting a great deal of no- 
tice. 

You will see, I said, that he will be sent back to sing in 
the choirs ; he who might be one of the first tenors of the 
troupe, and that, instead of having a value of his own, and 
signifying something, M. Sauzet will be by and by but a 
secondary utility, fit at most to make a keeper of the seals ! 

And knowing no longer what to make of him, I added : 

Where does M. Sauzet sit at present ? On what side ? 
With whom? What are his doctrines ? Who are his friends ? 
Whom does he follow 1 Whom does he lead ? Is this a 
position ? is this a character ? To begin by demanding the 
amnesty and end by voting the confiscation of the press and 
the transportations to Salazie ! What a debut and what a 
fall ! This infamous post fulfilled, the Doctrinarians slighted 
and treated him with scorn. 

Since then, fortune has again veered round, and behold 
him seated in the first post of the State, after that of king. 
He presides over and, consequently represents, the Chamber 
if you take his own word for it ; in like manner as the 
Chamber represents the Country, if it too is to be believed. 
Very fine this, if it were only true ! 

But as the representation of France is but a fiction in the 
person of the Chamber, the representation of the Chamber 



SAUZET. 191 

might well be likewise no more than a fiction in the presi- 
dent. 

Nevertheless, we are ordered by authority of the Doctri- 
narians, to prostrate ourselves in gaping admiration of the 
hierarchical gradation of the British constitution, as if there 
was the least resemblance between the most democratical 
of all democratical people and the most aristocratic of all 
aristocracies ! With our neighbors, there is at least some 
reality, some truth in these institutions, because they corres- 
pond to their manners, to their social condition, to their ideas, 
to their prejudices, if you will. With us, all is fiction — 
both persons and principles. 

Accordingly, to say what were yesterday, what are to- 
day, what will be to-morrow the principles of the Chamber, 
would be no easy task. To say what are, at the moment I 
write, the principles of M. Sauzet, were a task more em- 
barrassing still ; and, in truth, it is a knowledge of little 
consequence either to the Chamber, or to M. Sauzet himself, 
nor more to me. 

For the rest, the principle which every President of the 
Chamber, without allusion to any in particular, seems to 
comprehend the best is, that he is to pocket, and does in fact, 
pocket punctually, some hundred thousand francs, for ring- 
ing his bell, tapping with his penknife on the desk, and re- 
peating twenty, thirty, forty times, during the same silting, 
the following sacramental words : " Let those of the mem- 
bers who are in favor of adopting the motion please to stand 
up, and let those gentlemen who are of the contrary opinion 
please to rise !" 

Think you not, reader, that so interesting a piece of work 
is well worth a hundred thousand francs, besides lodging, an 
equipage and servants ? and for my part, I really do not 
deem it at all too much. 

When Giton and Thersite, these pests of the tribune, 
begin to harangue in the Areopagus, I can, I Timon, give 
a drachme or two to the door-keeper to let me out and I get 
into the open plains. 



192 DEVOLUTION OF JULY. 

But to be officially nailed to one's chair, to be obliged to 
hear Giton and Thersile from noon to sundown, without 
being able to fly them, nor to escape them — no, for a trade 
of this torture, a hundred thousand francs is not excessive, 
and I am sure that I would not be willing to earn them. 




^GENERAL LAFAYETTE. 



Public opinion has fts prejudices. Thus, it has been 
said of three persons of the liberal party — Lafitte, Dupont 
de'l'Eure and Lafayette — that Lafitte did not compose his 
own discourses, that Dupont de'l'Eure was merely a good 
man, and that Lafayette was but a simpleton. 

But, Lafitte was the most clear-headed and comprehen- 
sive financier of our times. The good sense of Dupont 
de'l'Eure, as far as it goes, is said to prove, like Phocion's, 
the axe to many a labored speech. But Lafayette was a 
mere simpleton ; oh ! quite simple, I own : he believed, as 
did a multitude of simpletons which we have all been in 
common with him, in the promises of the government of 
July. 

He imagined, the simpleton ! that kings were to -be 
found who would not resemble all other kings; that a 
man must love liberty because he drawls out some hurras 
in honor of it ; that we were brought round to the golden 
age ; that the reins might be thrown loose upon the back 
of the government, and it would curb itself. Subsequently 
when he saw that the same piece continued to be played 
day after day upon the great stage, and that the only change 
of decoration was, the substitution of a dunghill cock for the 
lily, he repented, wept bitterly, and striking his breast ex- 
claimed : " Pardon me, my God ! pardon me, beloved com- 
rades in liberty ! I have been a dupe and a duper." 



-^^ 



GENERAL LAFAYETTE. 193 

Not a duper, I can well believe ; but it v.as too mucli 
for you, Lafayette, to have been a dupe ! Few are the 
men to whom Providence has given the opportunity and 
the means of regenerating their country and establishing 
its liberties. To lose this opportunity is a crime against 
one's country. 

Lafayette has committed two great faults from which 
posterity will not absolve him. In making to Napoleon, 
after the defeat of Waterloo, an opposition in the tribune 
and the cabinet, he divided our forces, and v/as thus co- 
operating, without meaning it, to the dismemberment of 
France. He failed to see, like the great Carnot, that Napo- 
leon alone could then save the country, that the independ- 
cnco of the nation ought so to fill the soul of the citizen, 
that (to compare small things with great,) I would not hesi- 
tate myself despite of my "repugnance," as Manuel would 
say, to take sides with a certain personage, if I were well 
convinced that the said personage alone would, in a given 
case, prevent the subjugation and partition of France. 
For, before all liberty, before any form of government, 
before any political or social organization, before any 
administrative system, before anything and all things — the 
safety of the nation ! 

The second fault of Lafayette was that of July. The 
imperial throne was vacant. Lafayette reigned the third 
day over Paris, and Paris reigned over France. Three 
parties were in deliberation. We know what was expected 
by the army and the people. But Lafayette allowed him- 
self to be wheedled by the Orleanists. The tri-colored flag 
was played off before the old man's eyes. He was seized 
by the hand and covered with caresses. His head was 
turned #ith loud-sounding flourishes about '89, Jemappe, 
Valmy, America, liberty, national guard, republican mon- 
archy, citizen, transatlantic, and what not? In short, in 
the open Place de Greve and in presence of the people, he 
was put under the goblet and fingered away. 

Lafayette, in his infantine candor, did not advert that he 
17 



104 REVOi.UTION OF JULY. 

had to do with profligates more profligate than those of the 
regency. When the patriots confided their alarms to him^ 
he put a hand to his heart and pledged his own fidelity to 
liberty, for the fidelity of the others. In his deplorable 
blindness, he left everything to the management of the 
majority of the Chambers of 1830, who had in fact done 
nothing, and left nothing to the disposal of the people who 
had brought all about. Had not the patriots taken the word 
of Lafayette, who repeated to them naively what he was 
told, things would have been arranged in a different man- 
ner, and it would not be now forbidden, by the laws of 
September, to write the history of that other day of Dupes, 
which none could do with more fidelity than I, as the whole 
thing was acted behind the curtain where I was, and I alone 
took no part in the farce. 

Lafayette was not an orator, if we understand by oratory 
that emphatic and loud-sounding verbosity which stuns the 
auditors and leaves but wind in the ear. His was a serious 
and familiar conversation, grammatically incorrect if you 
will, and a little redundant, but cut into curt phrases and 
relieved occasionally by happy turns. No figures, no 
liighly- colored imagery ; but the proper word in the proper 
place, the precise word which expresses the exact idea — no 
passionate transports, but a speech infused with feeling by 
the accent of conviction — no strong, cogent, elaborate logic, 
but reasonings systematically combined, obviously con- 
nected amongst each other, and resulting naturally from 
the exposition of the facts. 

There was in the habits of his person and in his counte- 
nance, I know not what mixture of French grace, American 
phlegm and Roman placidity. 

When he ascended the tribune and said : " I am*a repub- 
lican," no one felt tempted to ask him : " What is that you 
say. Monsieur de Lafayette, and wherefore the declaration ?" 
Every one was satisfied the friend of Washington could not 
but be a republican. 

He had a habit of sneaking freely of the kind's r>f i5u- 



GENERAL LAFAYETTE. 195 

rope, whom he treated unceremoniously as despots, and as 
one power would another. He stirred up against them, in 
his wide propagandism, all the fires of popular insurrection. 
To the oppressed of every country he opened his house, his 
purse and his heart. 

He should be seen when he resisted in the tribune the 
dastardly abandonment of the Greeks and the Poles. Then 
did his overflowing indignation rush on like a torrent ; his 
virtue was eloquence, and his language, ordinarily cheerful, 
was charged with fire and lightning. 

Lafayette had what is better than ideas, he had principles, 
fundamental principles, to which he ever adhered with an 
immovable pertinacity. He wished the sovereignty of the 
people both in theory and practice ; and, in truth, this is the 
whole. But he troubled himself no more about the tyranny 
of all or of several, than that of one. He considered the 
substance rather than the form, justice rather than the laws, 
principles before governments, and the human race before 
nations. He would have free minorities under a dominant 
majority. 

When the sturdiest characters gave way, when the finest 
geniuses passed one after another, under the yoke of Napo- 
leon, and the nation, infatuated with his glory and conquests, 
ran to meet his triumphal car, Lafayette resisted the current 
of fortune and of men, without violence to others or strug- 
gle with himself, simply by the immovability of his convic- 
tions, like a rock that stands stirlcss amid the conflicting agi- 
tation of the waves. 

The love of gold, from which kings themselves are not 
exempt, had no place in his great soul. The vulgar ambi- 
tion of a throne was far beneath him ; and at the utmost 
what he would desire would-have been to be Washington, 
if he had not been Lafayette. 

Lafayette experienced, even in his' old age, that yearning of 
affectionate hearts to be universally loved. But this noble 
propension, so delightful to indulge in private life, is almost 
always dangerous in political aflTairs. A true statesman must 



196 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

be ready to sacrifice his friendships and his popularity itself 
for the interests of his country. 

The Revolution of July 'was executed by tho school 
students of the middle classes and of the people, and con- 
ducted by two old men, Lafitte and Lafayette. The former 
commenced the movement by the lever of his popularity 
and his credit, and Lafayette accomplished it by means of 
the tri-colored flag, and the bayonets of the National Guard. 

Strange inventions of modern genius ! The telescope has 
peopled the firmament with worlds of stars. The compass 
has discovered America. The invention of gunpowder has 
changed the system of warfare. Paper money has over- 
thrown feudalism, by the substitution of movable wealth, 
commercial and industrial, to landed wealth and predomi- 
nance. Printing has pierced a thousand mouths in the 
trumpet of fame. Steam has supplied, on land and water, 
the motive power of horses, water, and wind. In fine, the 
National Guard has taken the government out of the abso- 
lute hands of the king, to restore it to those of the country. 
In fad, the National Guard of each village is master of the 
village, of each town of the town, of each city of the city, 
and the Guards united of all the villages, towns and cities, 
are masters of France. What I say of France may be said 
of all Europe; for it may truly be said that, throughout 
all the rest of Europe, the muskets are ready, the matches 
are ready, the banner is ready, and there remains but to 
issue the proclamation and appoint the officers. And it hap- 
pens, as if by I know not what providential design, that the 
most revolutionary of all institutions has been invented and 
put in practice by the most I'evolutionary of all men. 

Yes, Lafayette has been the man the most frankly and 
resolutely revolutionary of our time. He entered with ardor, 
with impetuosity into every combination which had for its 
object the subversion of some despotism, and life was with 
him a stake of no great account. Martyr to his political 
faith, he would have mounted the scaffold and held out his 
head to the executioner, with the serenity of a young wo- 



GENERAL LAFAYETTE. 197 

man who, crowned with roses, drops into slumber at the 
close of a banquet. 

It is confidently reported that after the funeral oration of 
General Lamarque, certain conspirators entertained the hor- 
rible design to kill Lafayette in the carriage in which they 
led him back in triumph, and to exhibit his bloody corpse to 
the people, like Anthony, in order to excite them to insur- 
rection ; which having been after related to Lafayette, he 
only smiled, as if he considered the thing natural and an in- 
genious stratagem ! 

I have the idea, but do not affirm it — for who could affirm 
or gainsay it — that Lafayette, on his death-bed, in the last 
lullings of thought, flattered himself that an insurrection of 
the people might possibly break out on the passage of his 
remains to the grave, to reannnate liberty and illustrate his 
obsequies ! 

There are many fiery lovers of democracy who might be, 
as far as the thing is now possible, aristocrats, if they were 
born among the aristocracy. It is difficult to determine 
whether such are of the liberal party from spite or from con- 
viction ; and their love of equality is often but an arrogant 
covetousness of privileges which they do not enjoy. But 
when men of birth become democrats, the people surround 
them with their confidence, because these have honored the 
popular cause by a costly abjuration. Such was Lafayette. 

He retained, of the old aristocracy, but that refined and 
sprightly naivete, which is the grace of speech, and that 
elegant simplicity of manners, which is passed away and 
will never return. But his soul was entirely plebeian. He 
loved the people in his heart, as a father loves his children, 
ready at all hours of the day or the night, to rise, to march, 
to fight, to suffer, to conquer or be conquered, to sacrifice 
himself for it without reserve, with his fame, his fortune, 
his liberty, his blood and his life. 

Illustrious citizen ! contemporary at once of our fathers 
and our children, placed, as if to open and to close it, at the 
two extremities of this heroic half-ccntury, you have wit- 

17* 



•j*^il 



198 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

nessed the death of the revolution of 1789, beneath the . 
of a soldier, and that of the revolution of 1880, under 
cat-o'-nine-tails of the Doctrinarians ; and, notwithstandin 
this twofold failure, you did not regret what you had accom- 
plished for them, for you knew that everything has its due 
time, and that, though it may germinate and flourish more 
or less slowly, not a grain is lost of the seed which is sown 
in the fields of republicanism ! You knew that all nations, 
some by the direct paths, others by oblique routes, are ad- 
vancing towards their emancipation v»'ith the irresistibility 
of the current which empties the waters of all the tributary 
rivers into the sea, and you moved on, with head erect and 
hopeful heart, along the highways of truth ! I thank you, 
generous old man, for not having been shaken in your faith 
in the eternal sovereigr* of the nations, and for having al- 
ways sacredly preferred tne proscribed to their oppressors, 
the people to their tyrants ! When the veil of a patriotic 
but deplorable illusion fell from your eyes and showed you 
the present generation, with its gangrened sores and its dy- 
ing languors, you turned consoled to the vitality, the virtue, 
and the greatness of future generations ; you did not allow 
yourself to be overcome, like Benjamin Constant, by the 
melancholy of disgust, and you were worthy of liberty be- 
cause you never despaired of her cause ! 



ODILLON-BARROT. 199 



ODILLON-BARROT. 

Odillon-Barrot does not possess, like Maguin, one of 
those lithe and spiritual figures which twirl about incessant- 
ly as on a pivot, and which, reflecting both shade and light, 
both force and grace, please when painted, by the variety of 
ornaments and the bold vivacity of lineament and coloring. 

Odillon-Barrot is marked rather by the imposing and staid 
wisdom of the philosopher than the capricious activity and 
brilliant impetuosity of the extemporizers. His intellect, 
like a fruit precocious but sound, has ripened before its time. 
He was, at four-and-twenty, an advocate of the Councils 
and of the Court of Cassation. Nicod was the dialectitian 
of his companions ; Odillon-Barrot was the orator. 

Half lawyer, half politician, Odillon-Barrot had already, 
under the Restoration, set his name beside the most celebrat- 
ed names of the Opposition, and liberty was proud in num- 
bering him among her defenders. 

Odillon-Barrot studies little and reads little ; he meditates. 
His mind has no activity and can scarce keep awake but in 
the upper regions of thought. A minister, he would lan- 
guish and be dangerously dilatory in matters of application. 
He would be more fit to direct than to execute, and would 
excel much less in action than in counsel. He would neg- 
lect the details and daily current of business, not that he 
was unqualified for it, but he would be inattentive to it. 

He sheds his own fertility upon the subject, rather than 
borrows any from it. He culls off it but the blossom, he 
touches but the elevations. He reflects rather than observes. 
What strikes him first in a subject is its general aspect; and 
this mode of viewing things arises from the particular aptitude 
of his mind, from the exercise of the tribune and the practiceof 
his former calling as advocate of the Court of Cassation. No 
man is more capable of making an abstract and presenting 



200 R E V O L U '1' I O N O 1' JULY. 

a summary of a theory ; and I regard Odillon-Barrot as the 
first generalizer of the Chamber. He even possesses this 
faculty in a higher degree than M . Guizot, who brings it to 
bear but upon certain points of philosophy and politics, 
whereas Odillon-Barrot improvisates his generalizations with 
remarkable power, upon the first question that ofters. Both 
are dogmatic, like all theorists. Both positive, but M. Gui- 
zot more ; for Guizot doubts less than Odillon-Barrot. He 
decides more promptly, and carries his resolution into effect 
with the energy and determination of his character. 

Odillon-Barrot is an honest man, a quality which I am 
ashamed to praise, but which, however, I am obliged to 
praise, since it is so rare. No manager, no intriguer, and 
scarce ambitious. His political reputation is high and with- 
out a stain ; his eloquence is always ready when the cause 
is generous, always at the service of the oppressed. Odillon- 
Barrot enjoys electoral popularity, but not popular popular- 
ity. At the same time, it appears hard to conceive that 
Odillon-Barrot is not at heart a radical by sentiment of 
equality, by experience of monarchical government, by con- 
scions dignity of manhood, by foresight of the future. How 
is it, then, that, in the tribune, he is so prone, uselessly 
enough, to make dynastical professions of faith ? This is 
sometimes explained by saying that he feels for the person 
of Louis-Philippe a sort of unaccountable predilection which 
captivates and enthralls him. But v/e are very sure that 
Odillon-Barrot does not love Louis-Philippe upon whatever 
conditions, after the manner of his domestics, liveried in silk 
and gold, and that he v/ould not hesitate a single instant, 
were he obliged to choose, between the cause of the country 
and the Ordinances of another July. 

Odillon-Barrot has a beautiful and meditative countenance. 
His vast and well-developed forehead announces the power 
of his intellect. His voice is full and sonorous, and his ex- 
pression singularly grave. In dress, he is somewhat fini- 
cal, which does not misbecome him. His attitude is digni- 
fied without being theatrical, and his gesticulation is full of 



O D 1 L L O N - ]5 A R R O T . 201 

noble simplicity. When speaking, he animates, intonates, 
kindles, colors his expression, which is cold and dull wlien 
he writes. His discussion is solid and learned, strong in 
matter, sufficiently ornate, and always swayed by his elevat- 
ed reason. He is apt to apply himself less, in a cause, to 
the point of fact than the question of law, He seizes it, 
sounds it, turns it over, and extracts from it its whole con- 
tents of new views and broad and salient considerations. 

His method is, at the same time, not without defect. He 
is often embarrassed amid the prolixities of his exordium. 
He loses himself also in the breadth of his conceptions, and 
rejoins them with great difficulty when their thread is bro- 
ken. In like manner, he does not precipitate sufficiently 
rapidly his harangues to an end. Perhaps, indeed, this 
affects me more disagreeably than another, as I like above 
all things that the discourse be substantial and compressed. 
I must allow, however, that Odillon-Barrot is more abundant 
than diffuse, and there is pleasure in accompanyino- him to 
the chase of ideas, while your vulgar rhetoricians pursue 
and catch but phrases. 

^ Odillon-Barrot is more reasoning than ingenious, more 
disdainful than bitter, more temperate than vehement. His 
eye wants fire". You do not feel enough his breast heave 
and his heart bound against the oppression of despotism. 
Too often his vigor flags and fails, and his weapon weighs 
him down bef^j^re the close of the combat. 

Master of his passions and of his words, he calms with- 
in him and around him, the wrath of the Centre and the 
turbulence of the Left. He prepares and covers the re- 
treat, in the most difficult passes, with the ability of a con- 
summate strategist: he is the FabiusCunctatorof the Oppo- 
sition. Unhappily, these tactics of temporization, when too 
often repeated, damp parliamentary courage, not already 
very daring. The part of the Opposition is not to hide itself 
behind the baggage-carts, but to push energetically to the 
front of battle. When the people do not see their defenders 



202 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

mount llie breach and fire, they become lukewarm, yawn, 
turn away and go in quest of other spectacles. 

The orators are the spoiled cliildren of the press ; and 
as spoiled children beat their nurse, the orators are in the 
tribune, constantly abusing the press. It is very much 
also the fault of the press itself, for you see it go into ec- 
stasy at every word that drops from the lips of these parlia- 
mentary heroes, and receive their rhapsodies so preciously 
in its finest linen, as if they were so many venerable and 
saintly relics. There is perhaps not one of our orators, 
dynastic or ministerial, who has not been told a hundred 
times that he was beautiful, sublime, admirable ; and who, 
incensed all over with their praises, does not fancy himself 
in fact a little marvel of eloquence, quite on a level with 
Cicero or Demosthenes. Are you now astonished that 
these gentlemen assume incredible airs of vanity, and that 
their head is turned under the fanning of these adulations? 
I myself, notwithstanding the misanthropy with wliich I am 
reproached, I have yielded, I yield at the moment I write, 
to this amiable weakness of the press, and have too much 
moderated the impetuosity and ardor of my pencil. In 
truth it would be small harm to extol the oratorical merits 
of our discoursers ; it would be at most a fault of taste. But 
there is something of a nature more gross in this sort of in- 
fatuation j in fact we have witnessed so many somersets 
of opinion, that one cannot be too much on^guard against 
the political probity of the most illustrious of our parliamen- 
tarians. It is constantly to be dreaded that they will seek 
to reinstate themselves in the favor of heaven, and offer us, 
after the example of M. Thiers, the edification of one day 
seeing them on both knees, invoking divine Providence. It 
is well therefore to keep a stiff rein to them, and not to spare 
the spurs when they halt or slacken pace upon a fair 
road, nor even the lash when they deal some joltings to 
liberty. 

It is a misfortune to Odillon-Bafrrot not to have by him a 
single friend, that is to say, a man who would tell him the 



ODILLUN-BARROT. 203 

truth. He has been spoiled by dint of doing reverence to 
his eloquence and virtues. He is so bepuffed that he will 
by and by be inflated into a wind-bag. It will be carried 
so far as to make him believe that the consequences he in- 
sists upon are always exactly in accord with the principles 
which he does, not possess ; that his vague theses do not 
evaporate in mist, and that his moderation never sinks into 
the langour of impotence. 

Who does not remember the Opposition of fifteen years 
ago? At rare intervals, but in compact array, night and 
day, it kept watch, armed, marched, fought. It did not 
wait till confronted by danger, it rushed to meet it. A 
minister had scarce done violating the domicile of the ob- 
scurest citizen, than he was taken in the act and called to 
account. The smallest liberty was no sooner menaced 
than it found defenders. An arbitrary act was hardly 
committed by the government than it was denounced by the 
Opposition. A patriotic deed, a liberal sacrifice was scarce- 
ly knowai, than it was crowned by popular applause. All 
the deputies of the Left were one in thought, in doctrine, in 
vote, in action. It was the golden age of the party, the 
season of youth and hope ! 

But since the Revolution of July and in the earlier legis- 
latures, the dynastic Opposition has marched divided under 
discordant chiefs. It knew not what it wanted nor whither 
it was going. It was actuated rather by dislikes than by 
hopes, by aversions than by principles. It was overrun by 
the extra-parliamentary Opposition, whose brilliant star 
arose amid the mists of the evening to guide new genera- 
tions to other shores. Cramped within its little burgess 
circle, it reanimated, it recruited itself no more at the foun- 
tains of popular inspiration. It seemed as if it bore upon 
its brow the brand of its original sin, of that atrocious usur- 
pation which it perpetrated in 1830 upon the sovereignty 
of the people, and that, despondent, repentant, weary of 
others and of itself, it would hide from all eyes, and in the 
depths of solitude, its sorrow and remorse. 



204 K E V O L U T i O N OF JULY. 

It knew not even to v/hat degree it was advancing 
towards the Centre, of which the Third party debarred it the 
way, nor where it halted in the direction of the extreme 
Left. It was incapable of either defining its position, of 
counting its forces, or conducting itself or getting itself con- 
ducted ; it knew not where to plant its standard, nor under 
what banner to rank itself; nor what was the password, 
nor when the day of battle, nor for what cause to fight, nor 
who was to be commander. Had it two leaders ? Had it 
only one ? Was this Odillon-Barrot ? Was it Maguin ? 
If Odillon-Barrot desired to take the command, Maguin 
spited, like another Achilles, pouted in his tent, abandoning 
the Greeks to the darts of Hector and the wrath of the gods. 
No consultation, no combination, no plan, no system. 
Odillon-Barrot was too absorbed in his political reveries to 
discipline his troops. Maguin was too venturesome for them 
to confide themselves to the caprices of his schemes. One 
was too absent-minded, the other too light-minded. They 
were not content to be soldiers, they were not qualified to 
be officers. 

The dynastic Opposition was accustomed to act with a 
sloth of movement, a circumspection of periphrases and a 
superabundance of academical preliminaries, which is quite 
antipathical to the French character. You were constantly 
tempted to cry to these orators :^To the fact ! to the fact ! 
come at last to the fact ! 

It never attacked, it only resisted. It dissertated, but 
did not argue. It complimented the ministry upon its good 
intentions, while it was transgressing still more by the 
intention than the fact. It began with anger to end with 
disgust. It stopped short in the middle of its consequence, 
through fear of the principle. It would not say of a bad 
institution that it was bad, but that it was badly applied. 
It would have a monarchy without the conditions of mon- 
archy, and it demanded what a republic alone could yield, 
while strenuously denying that it had the least desire 
of a republic. The strong were mortified at its lack 



ODILLON-BARROT. 205 

of energy ; the weak, themselves, began to fear, in leaning 
upon it, that it would sinit beneath them. Its temporizing 
was but inertness, its moderation but pusillanimity. 

As it knew not itself what it was it wanted, the patriots 
throughout the country knew not what it ought to seek. 
Each session passed away in hearing speeches, very fine to 
be sure, rather inconclusive, and three weeks thereafter to be 
buried in oblivion. Who remembers anything of them ? 
and what did they say 1 

You have seen those meagre grasses that sprout through 
the chinks of a wall ; it is well that they be a little agitated 
by the wind to strengthen their filaments. So with the 
ministry ; the gentle and rustling attacks of the Opposition, 
instead of shaking its hold, only give it vigor and root. 

Another reproach to be made the dynastic Opposition, and 
this is the gravest, is that it pays too little attention to the in- 
struction and moralization of the people. Of constitutional 
phraseology, it will be as profuse, in the Chamber, as you 
please ; but of money or time elsewhere, not an hour or a 
stiver. ' It is found at the head of no intellectual establish- 
ment. It directs nothing, centralizes nothing, vivifies noth- 
ing. The session closed, each takes flight towards the stee- 
ple of his locality, re-enters his nest, and there squats, warm 
and repo^ng, until the season of parliamentary storms. 

I have asked myself often, not why I should not partici- 
pate the opinions of %dillon-Barrot, but why he should not 
be of mine. If I had Odillon-Barrot in a corner of the 
confessional, I am sure that between his ideas and mine there 
would not be the breadth of a hair. But, out of the con- 
fessional, it would no longer be the same thing. Odillon- 
Barrot, like several other great and good patriots, commenced 
by serving the government of the 7th August, which since 
. . . . . but there are certain precedents which explain cer- 
tain managements, and which force a man into situations of 
inconsistence from which, once entered, no eflTorts can after 
extricate him. But we, who have had the good fortune not 
to accept the fat favors and employments that were flung at 

18 , 



20G REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

our head, wc wlio have not been soiled by the impure touch 
of tlie ministry, we are not disposed, for our part, to con- 
tinue this comedy of fifteen years. We are aware that 
people say, some that we are imprudent, and others that we 
are dupes. These, that we are ambitious — ambitious of 
^what ? Those, that we are utopists, Carlists, anarchists, 
agrarians, and whatever you please. With a few spots and 
a little paint on both cheeks, we might win the good graces 
of the electors and the caresses of power. But we should 
play an unworthy part, a part we certainly will not play. 
We are perfectly aware, we can expect but to be despised, 
scoffed at, hissed, persecuted for our love to liberty, and what 
is worst of all, to be mistaken for suspicious patriots, and 
misapprehended by the ignorant. But there is such a power 
of attraction in truth, there is a gratification of conscience 
so noble and so pure in defending the popular cause, that 
the greatest sacrifices, were they needed, would appear to 
us light indeed, and all the joys of the world have nothing 
comparable to this ! 

The difference between Odillon-Barrot and us, is this : 
that we insist upon the consequences of our principle, 
whereas he renounces the principle of his consequences. 
Another difference is, that he does not wish our co-operation, 
and that we, on the contrary, are desirous of his.- We de- 
sire it in order at least to see resolved this insoluble problem 
of a monarchy dancing upon a slacl#l"ope without the aid 
of a balancer. It is a regret, a heartfelt regret, to me espe* 
cially who esteem and love him, as he well knows, these 
twenty years back, not to be able to be on his side, and to 
see myself obliged, perhaps some day, to be opposed to him ; 
a circumstance which, while, through patriotism, I desire his 
accession to power, would lead me, through affection, to dep- 
recate it. I honor Odillon-Barrot, but I pity him. I pity 
and- blame him. For he is not, like me, and like so many 
others, master of his political individuality. He is more 
than a person, he is at present, in the Chamber and the. na- 
tion, the head of a collective opinion, the representative of 



O D I L L O N - B A R R O T . 207 

the liberal burgess class, the avowed and incontestable leader 
of a numerous and powerful party. Odillon-Barrot leads 
to combat the most numerous phalanx of the Chamber. 
They are but chance soldiers, conscript aggregations, bat- 
talions of accident, ojfficers without troops, scouts, guerillas, 
adventurers and mercenaries. But by dint of enjoining his 
people to be very reasonable, very wise, not to furbish their 
arms, not to make too much noise, to wait, to wait always, 
Odillon-Barrot has rendered them cautious, lao-^ard and 
almost timorous. So well has he clipped the wings of the 
dynastic Opposition, for fear apparently of its escape, that it 
can no longer either fly or walk. In place of returning its 
adversary dart for dart, it contents itself quite christianly 
with stanching the blood and binding the wound. Instead 
of flowing always in the same channel and retaining the 
same name, it has mingled with other rivers sprung from 
other sources, so that we can no more recognize either its 
course or its waters. It has ceased to have any proper and 
distinct personality. It goes and comes like a floating body 
from one bank to the other. It explodes and dissipates its 
force. It extends and coils itself. It has no limits, because 
it has no domain, and that it transfers its territory and stand- 
ard wheresoever the caprice of the winds may carry and 
keep it. It is the ally of all who ask it, but under the odd 
condition of never profiting by the victory. It lends to 
whoever would borrow, but at the interest of never repay- 
ing. It gives but never receives. It chains itself to parties 
without exacting the least reciprocity of tie. It assumes all 
the duties, without claiming the rights, all the charges with- 
out enjoying the benefits. It fears its enemies to the degree 
of not daring to look them in the face. It is afraid of itself, 
to the degree of not venturing to count its numbers. It 
takes its illusions for sentiments, and its sentiments for max- 
ims. It is polite and courteous, but it is a dupe. It is hon- 
est, disinterested, virtuous, eloquent, but it is not capable. 
It docs the business of the government, but not that of 
France. Would it not be better to leave the sewers of cor- 



208 11 E V O L U T.I O N OP JULY. 

ruptioii to disgorge themselves, without wallowing in their 
mire, to repudiate adulterous and disreputable connections, 
to press around the flag of liberty, and fight to the last drop 
of blood for 'the eternal truth of principle, and say Avith 
Francis First, on delivering up his sword : " All is lost ex- 
cept honor !" 

But it is that the dynastic Opposition is not reduced to 
this, and that it has lost nothing, neither honor nor the rest. 

I insist, because this anomaly is the trait the most charac- 
teristic of the physiognomy of Odillon-Barrot ; never has 
there been witnessed so much force and so much feebleness, 
so many engagements, with so large a troop and so few vic- 
tories, so much speech-making and so little action, so much 
noise and so little wool. What or who is to blame? Fa- 
tality, the fault of the principle, the want of skill, the color 
of the banner, the soldiers or the general ? What better is 
needed, however, and when to be expected ? I do not fear 
exaggerating when I say that at the moment I write, Odillon- 
Barrot, with the elections free, would, if he wished, be made 
a candidate in two hundred of the electoral colleges. So 
completely is he the expression, the formula, the true truth 
'of the burgess monopoly. Situation without example in our 
annals, fortune unheard of and which seems to have befallen 
him asleep ! but also responsibility far greater than that of 
any minister, and of which he will one day owe an account 
to his country. Does he not already hear electoral France 
cry : " Varus, give me back my legions !'" 

It is however a pity ! What a fine and valiant band you 
had to lead, and whither would they not have carried you. 
Varus, had you known to avoid the defiles and gorges of 
Germany ! What soldiers ! But since they are defiling 
before me, why may I not runningly sketch their roll ? 

It was you, first, M. Dufaure, terror of the Doctrinarians, 
minister dead and laid out at your full length in the sweat and 
dust of the 29th October, who would be very glad of a res- 
urrection before the final judgment, and who had commenced 
your career as aide-de-camp of Odillon-Barrot. You con- 



ODILLON-BARROT. 209 

veyed, the day of battle, the order of your general, and 
caracoled about the wings of the dynastic Opposition. You 
supported the harassed troops and covered their retreat. You 
were colonel of the heavy cavalry. Your weapon was ar- 
gument, and you excelled in its management. You mastered 
the questions of law. You took them on every side. You 
divided, dissected, unfolded them in some sort, and laid bare 
their inmost recesses. 

You came next, M. Duces, Avith eyes full of fire, and as- 
pect pale and contemplative. M. Ducos has something of the 
Girondist in the pomp and brilliance of his language. He 
makes his heart discourse with a religious abundance, and 
the sacred words of country, of conscience, of virtue flow 
unctuously from his lips. I fear there is more imagination 
and tenderness of soul in his talent than of logic. M. Ducos 
has something candid in his manner which touches and 
pleases. He has the heart and the voice of an orator. 

At the time of the famous discussion respecting the con- 
temptible affair of the American claims, M. Ducos had the 
sagacity to see what it was to enter upon a false route. As 
he made use of terms mysterious, covert, inexplicable in ap- 
pearance, to say, rather not to say, what had become of the 
funds, M. Guizot, ferule in hand, rushed to the tribune, and in 
the tone of a master who orders up a scholar, summoned M. 
Ducos to explain his hieroglyphics. Ducos stammered, and 
it was amusing to see the doctrinarian hold M. Ducos in his 
clutches like a poor bird, and refuse to Jet him go without a 
formal retraction of what he had said or not said. There 
w^as, in truth no need of getting into such a rage. No one 
has ^er pretended that M. Guizot had pilfered, stolen, 
trafficked, sold, discounted, embezzled the American debt. 
Ah ! my God, M. Guizot, you well know that the allusion 
was not to you. You do not gamble stocks in the dens of' 
brokerage. You are not the person who sends gold in bars 
to the banks of England and the United States. You are 
not a large capitalist, an enormous stockjobber. You know 
perfectly well that these debts, though nominally in the 



210 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

^ hands of American owners, had not the less really and foully 
fallen into hands which we dare not name ; which make 
money of everything, which are proverbial for rapacity, and 
which will, one day, be nailed to the pillory of history. You 
knew all this, M. Guizot, quite as well as we. Must we 
then write you the names with the finger ? Come, come, 
only have the will and you will soon cease to be ignorant of 
what everybody knows. 

You too, were you not, are you not still, one of the troop, 
you M. IsAMBERT, man of vast erudition in all law, civil, crim- 
inal, administrative, diplomatic and commercial, I do not say 
ecclesiastical, for we are not agreed upon the matter wherein 
I had the honor to encounter and perhaps discomfit you. 
Conscientious man, whence your eloquence, when occasion- 
ally you are so 1 Why, from your heart. Rifler of records, 
of secret documents and unofficial treatises, where do you 
unearth all these things ? Why, where your science and your 
ardor guide you, where others do not think of going, do not 
know how to study, to explore, to plunder. M. Isambert 
shakes off the dust from mouldy archives and old books. He 
analyzes, extracts, deciphers manuscripts. He collates the 
editions, compares the passages, and confronts curiously the 
dates. He amalgamates afterwards the whole in an exposition 
substantiated and sustained, by facts, calculations and author- 
ities. He has none of those theories which fall in beautiful 
cadence and flatter agreeably the ear, like the windy rhetori- 
cians of the Socialist party. He reasons upon documents 
and figures ; for the ministers who laugh at your theories, 
cannot dispose quite so cavalierly of facts. If the facts are 
not true, they deny them ; if they are true, they den;^them 
still. But M. Isambert displays before their eyes the texts, 
and if they are unwilling to read them themselves, he reads 
them. M. Isambert dismays and torments them. Poor fel- 
lows ! What is it they have done to merit such treatment ? 

He, with hair prematurely gray and countenance so pale, 
whom death has surprised in a dilemma, it was Nicod ; a 
powerful dialectitian, an intellect comprehensive and vigor- 



ODILLON-BARROT. 211 

ous, who approached his subject without indecision and dis- 
patched it without fatigue. The thoughts of Nicod flowed 
vivid and copious. His strength had nothing too strained 
or too salient. A democrat from conviction, independent in 
spite of his amovability, passionate but in the cause of jus- 
tice. When he got animated and indignant at the violation 
of a principle, he found eloquence in defending but right, 
and seeking but truth. 

There goes Bigno:^, whom relentless death has already 
wrapped in his shadow ; Bignon, a clever writer, an inge- 
nious and learned speaker, a lover of our nationality, but 
moderate to timidity. There are who betray their trust by 
abuse of speech ; there are who betray it by abuse of si- 
lence. For a long time, people asked why Bignon, the first 
diplomatist of the Chamber, never spoke upon foreign af- 
fairs. Were we then become anew the conquerors of Eu- 
rope ? Bignon was not so proud as this ! He had tl^e honor 
to be deputy, the first honor of the country, and he suffered 
himself to be travestied a peer of France. Oh ! weakness 
of old age ! 

. Pass, pass before me M. Charamaule, dogged jurisconsult, 
subtle dialectian, and most puzzling of cross-questioners. 
You, M. Charlemagne, so precise and so penetrating. You, 
M. Dubois, doctrinal rather than doctrinarian, profound and* 
solid metaphysician, v/arm and radiant writer ! You con- 
ceive with fruitfulncss, but bring forth with pain. When 
your thoughts and sentiments flow over, you are unable to 
contain them. They seem to inundate you, to take you by 
tlie throat and stifle you. You would unbosom yourself of 
lhei;i all at once, but your imperfect expression fails you. 
You seek them as they escape you, you disconcert yourself, 
you get embarrassed, you interrupt yourself, and strike, as 
if to recall them, with reiterated blows the resounding man- 
tel of the tribune. There are some orators whom their 
words suffocate ; with M. Dubois, it is tiie ideas. 

You, M. Havin, keen and piquant observer, who can 
touch with address the most delicate subjects, and tell the 



212 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

ministers, with a smile, some good truths which do not make 
them smile. Officer in waiting of Odillon-Barrot, is it not 
you 1 Oh ! yes, it is surely you who narrated the banquet 
of Thorigny with a wealth of description and a party adroit- 
ness for which I have, I think, already made you my com- 
pliments. 

You, M. Pages, disciple and brilliant successor of Benja- 
min Constant. Less versatile perhaps, less broken to the 
language of business, not possessing the skill of your mas- 
ter, to entwine himself serpent-wise around a thesis, and 
clasp it in the thousand coils of his crushing argumentation. 
Less dialectical, less copious, less natural and less ingeni- 
ous ; but perhaps more able and more practised in the art 
of throwing your ideas with precision into axioms ; more 
sparkling in the variety of your antitheses, more religious 
in your political morals, more chastened, more pure in the 
forms of your expression, and the only deputy whose writ- 
ten discourses can captivate, by the sustained splendor of 
style and thought, the attention of a Chamber distrait, care- 
less, and very little sensible to the pains taken to entertain 
it with eloquence. 

You, M. RoGEK, of financial and maritime notoriety ; 
useful and honest deputy, who filled the Chamber with 
♦shudderings of horror, while you painted to it in living 
colors, the tortures of imprisonment beneath the lurid and 
devouring sky of Senegal. 

You, M. DE Sade, conscientious disserter, who recite with 
a surd and psalmodizing voice whole discourses learned by 
rote and painfully elaborated. Well-instructed publicist, mod- 
erate Liberal, and one of the honestest men of the Chamber. 
You, M. DE Tracy, universal philanthropist, champion of 
humanity, man of virtue and purity, who find in your noble 
soul the loftiest impulses of eloquence, and who preferred the 
palms of the elective deputation to the burning and branding 
stigmas of the ministerial peerage. 

You, General Bertrand, energetic and true patriot, whose 
name shall never perish as long as fidelity to misfortune 



ODI LL ON - B ARROT. 213 

shall be honored among men, and as long as the rock of 
Saint-Helena shall hold its place amid the waves. Unlimited 
freedom of the press ! was his exclamation at the close of 
each of his speeches ; and in fact this is the bulwark of all 
representative government. If the friend of Napoleon is so 
liberal as this, it is not probable that Napoleon was, after 
all, so much the despot ! And in truth, notwithstanding the 
absolute character of his government, there were more ideas 
of liberty in the head of Napoleon, than in that of all the 
living kings of Europe at the present day. 

You, M. Chapays de Montaville, who is it has advised 
you, I know not wherefore, to paint me on foot, with a pur- 
ple cloak, the cut of an artist and other fancy decorations, 
which do much more honor to your imagination than your 
judgment. For me, I will not draw even your oratorical 
sketch ; I am unwilling that it should be said : " Ah ! Ti- 
mon, Timon, you praise tliose who praise you, and you too, 
then, have your confederates of adulation !" 

You, M. Chambolle, pupil of Carrel, indefatigable ath- 
lete of the press, who multiply by your able and elegant 
pen, the friends of liberty, and who never leave unwhipped 
either an apostasy of party or a treachery of principle. 

You, M. Salverte, exemplary man, austere philanthro- 
pist, courageous citizen, erudite scholar. Exact to your 
post, you are the first to enter and the last to quit the Cham- 
ber. Riveted to your bench, you follow continually with 
the keen eyes of intelligence, the most dry and difficult 
discussions. Not a law of any importance found you 
mute, not a ministerial villainy escaped your penetration, 
not a thesis of political economy whereupon you did not 
pour floods of light from your pregnant, practised and sa- 
gacious intellect. Whatever may be, even after death, the 
recklessness and injustice of parties, they cannot deprive 
you of your name of model-deputy. 

And you too, I must not forget you, M. Billaut, elegant 
and fluent orator, jurist and administrator, dialectition co- 
gent, nervous, rapid, incisive, who quitted but with regret 



214 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

the standard of Odillon-Barrot, and who would, were you 
pressed to it, again attach yourself to his fortunes. 

Such are the chiefs of the brave, intellectual and learned 
band which Odillon-Barrot has allowed to slip like water 
through his hands ! At last a few passed over into the 
ranks of the Extreme Left. The condottieri of the party, 
seeing that they were not occupied, determined to make 
war on their own account. They passed, arms and bag- 
gage, into the ministerial camp. The others, less prompt, 
less eager for the spoils, less impatient to take the yoke of 
servitude, have crossed the lines and hedges of the dynastic 
Opposition, and spread, on marauding excursions, through 
the vineyard of M. Thiers ; but after they have slept off 
the v/ine of contraband, they will return perhaps to the 
homestead. 

Odillon-Barrot has, besides, scarce ever had any trouble 
to give himself. As soon as he commits a fault, it is repair- 
ed. In proportion as he deserts himself, he is supported. 
According as he occasions a void in his ranks, it is filled 
up. Thus, while a portion of his adherents, through sheer 
neglect on his part, secede from Odillon-Barrot, there 
formed, there gathered upon his deserted wings, a little pha- 
lanx, aristocratic in origin, expert in the cxercitations of 
philosophy, history and political economy, friendly to meas- 
ured but limited progress, who are disgusted with the cor- 
ruption of what they see, with the sterility of what they 
hear, who are tired of the desperate strife of so many petty 
and sordid ambitions, who take concern in the amelioration 
of the condition of the people, and who would strip politics 
of that mass of misty fictions which envelope it, and would 
shed over it some rays of fresh and pure light. In this little 
band of officers, march in ranks unequal but close, M.M. de 
Tocqueville, de Sivry, de Terrebasse, de Laborde, de Ram- 
pon, de La Sizeraime, de Chasseloup, de Lanjuinais, de Cor- 
celles, de Courbarel, de Grammont. 

Here they are all armed, equipped and ready to mount ! 
They wait to charge but a sign from Odillon-Barrot. But 



ODILLON-B ARROT. 215 

an act of will is necessary, and can Odillon-Barrot perform 
it ? Is he after all made only to subserve the purposes of 
M,. Thiers and to add a cipher to his unity ? Does he not 
comprehend that the parliamentary Opposition cannot re- 
main, like a sort of Olympian Jupiter in a majestic repose, 
gazing with indifference as they pass upon the things of; 
heaven and earth ? Its part is motion, and perpetual motion. 
When it can, like the Extreme Left, pick up but principles,^ 
it takes the principles. When it can, like the Left, glean 
at once both the principles and the facts which put them in 
action, it must descend from theory to practice, and take the 
government at the point of the bayonet. Odillon-Barrot has 
been reproached with being too ambitions. My reproach 
would be, that he is not ambitious enough. He loans his 
funds to people who use them for their own ends, and return 
him neither principal nor interest. This is the trade of a 
dupe. 

Poor Chamber and poor Country ! public opinion is fast 
evaporating in smoke, and progress is fallen lame. While 
the parliament is at a halt, the Court recedes at a giant pace 
into the past. The Camarilla is spinning us days of shame 
and servitude. The government is fallen to a woman. 

During this time, what does the dynastic Opposition ? 
There it is reclining on the beach. It amuses itself by 
throwing grains of sand into the counter-revolutionary tor- 
rent which passes and carries it off. 



210 REVOLUTION OF JULY 



M. DUPIN. 

The chameleon which changes color even under the ga. 
zer's eye, the bird that makes a thousand twirls and darts 
off in the air, the disk of the moon which slips aside from 
the field of the telescope, the skiff that, on a stormy sea, 
mounts, dives, and reappears on the crest of the billows, a 
flitting shadow, a startled fly, a whirling wheel, a gleam of 
lightning, a vanishing sound — all these ^comparisons give 
but an imperfect ideq, of the rapidity of sensation and mobil- 
ity of mind of M. Dupin. 

How shall I contrive to sketch that disparate and ever- 
varying physiognomy ? by what means can I seize it, and 
where begin ? 

I tell you plainly, M. Dupin, that if you keep constantly 
stirring on your chair, if you keep turning about your head 
every moment, and do not sit for me better than that, I mean 
to break my pallet and fling down my pencils ! You wish 
that I make you a likeness, do you not ? Very well, be so 
kind then as to let me examine you for a few minutes 
merely. Also, do not set to scolding me if the proportions 
of your face are not always in accord, and some of the fea- 
tures be distorted. I am a painter, and to imitate nature, I 
must make the portrait conformable to the model. 

There are in M. Dupin two, three, four men ; nay, an 
infinity of different characters. There is the man of Saint- 
Acheul and the man of France, the man of the Tuileries 
and the man of the shop-keepers, the man of courage and the 
man of fear, the man of prodigality and the man of economy, 
the man of the exordium and the man of the peroration, the 
man who wishes and the man who does not, the man of the 
past and the man of the present — never the man of the fu- 
ture. 



M. DUflN. 217 

M. Dupin is an author, a lawyer, a magistrate, a presi- 
dent, an orator and a wit.* 

M. Dupin has written a good deal, some even in Latin — 
in bad Latin, to be sure, but it is still Latin — which he has 
learned late, almost without a teacher, and with a rare force 
of- intelligence. He has written a multitude of elementary- 
treatises upon law, good as well as bad, which might be 
strung one after another like beads, and which compose his 
entire baggage as author. 

These little tracts are scarce more than compilations of 
familiar legal science, brief, concise, judicious, but without 
originality. 

M. Dupin is not endowed with that faculty of patient and 
close investigation which digs into a subject and goes deeply 
down into the spring-heads of principles. Near objects he 
sees justly and quickly ; he does not see far and long. He 
has the philosophy of experience, he has not the philosophy 
of reflection. He cannot create, he only arranges. He 
throws off a manual as he draws up a declaration ; he could 
not compose a book. 

As advocate, his manner was lively, sarcastic, rough, 
jerking, able but without method, forcible but without grace. 
He carried to superstition his respect for the gown and wigs 
of the old parliament. He was a great stickler for what he 
called the prerogatives of his order, and you might have 
seen him ready to devote himself, to die if necessary, in de- 
fence of his gown and rabato — a thing which is assuredly 
quite heroic. He ransacked Justinian to find apothegms, 
history to amass citations, and the ancient authors to extract 
quaint sayings, and he mixed up the whole with some pleas- 
antries of his own fabric, which made it a seasoning rather 
piquant and singular. Blunt, impetuous, unequal, desul- 
tory, a stringer of anecdotes, prodigal of witticisms, he was 
the amusement of the auditory, the bar, the judges and the 
clients. 

As attorney-general of the gravest court of France, M. 

* Dlseur de bons-mots, 
19 



218 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 



• 



Dupin has retained of his professional talent but the serious 
and solid side. He does not possess the vast erudition of Mer- 
liuj neither the treasures of his jurisprudence, nor his free 
and rather subtile argumentation. But he has strong sense, 
a sure judgment, and his written pleadings are models of 
perspicuity, precision and logic. He is the lawyer rather 
than the legislator, a lover of the text rather than of the 
spirit. If there be two interpretations, the one philosophi- 
cal, the other vulgar, it is the vulgar that, by instinct, he 
will adopt. He has much sense and little genius. Spirit- 
less, inconsistent, and almost cowardly in political causes ; 
but in civil cases, firm, progressive, candid and dignified. 

As President of the Chamber, M. Dupin has great merits 
and great defects. He is versed in the precedents and the 
law, he applies with sagacity the rules of the House, and 
maintains the parliamentary prerogatives against the en- 
croachments of the ministry. Standing up, his eyes go the 
rounds of every point of the hall. He domineers, like a 
pedagogue, the noisy and intractable deputies, and deals 
them, from time to time, on the fingers, some smart slaps of 
the rule. 

He is not to be surpassed at unravelling the tangled thread 
of our legislative oratory. If a question happens to fall into 
the hands of confused and embarrassed speakers who hud- 
dle amendments upon amendments, distinctions upon dis- 
tinctions, and who, unable longer to comprehend it, drop it 
there, M. Dupin picks it up, wipes it clean, and winds it 
upon his fingers. He restores it its meaning, its policy, its 
divisions, its principle and its consequences. He is admi- 
rable at resuming the debates,' and exposes with so much 
neatness the logical order of the deliberation, that the least 
intelligent recognize it, and cry : " That's it !" 

Should some luckless deputy approach him too close, he 
rolls himself up like a hedge-hog, and the ministers them- 
selves do not venture to meddle with his prickles. If some 
oratorical novice makes his debut while members are talk- 
ing, and turns to the chair to claim silence, M. Dupin -flings 



M. DUPIN. 219 

at him, as the only answer, a withering sarcasm which stuns 
-the poor man and kills him off. Not that M. Dupin is nat- 
urally malicious, but he forgets sometimes that he is presid- 
ing, and when a bon-mot itches him, he cannot resist the 
temptation to scratch. 

Therj^ are still two characters to be painted in M. Dupin 
— the politician and the orator. 

M. Dupin is the most expressive and exact personification 
of the burgess, not the elegant and polished burgess of the 
Chaussee-d'Antin who apes the gentleman, not the petty 
burgess who wears linen lace and sells it ; but the burgess 
annuitant, the burgess functionary, the burgess proprietor, 
the burgess advocate, the burgess merchant, the big burgess 
who has no great relish for men of birth, and who turns 
up his nose at the laborer. To live every one for himself 
and every one within himself these are his favorite maxims 
of domestic philanthropy and of foreign policy. Become 
afterwards what may of the people ! 

He has the plebeian instinct, but not the revolutionary in- 
stinct. He has been Legitimist after having been Imperi- 
alist. He is now Philippist, and to-morrow would be repub- 
lican, without great concern about the change. But, for 
that matter, has not the burgess class he represents been by 
turns all this, and would it not be so again ? 

M. Dupin is going to speak : will he be to-day for the 
people, or for the government ? he has to choose. For both 
at once, is still better, or for one after the other, before, be- 
hind, as you please, and this without the smallest embarrass- 
ment in the world. He has always three or four inclina- 
tions to start from three or four different points, and ordina- 
rily he rushes across the first current without knowing and 
without caring, for that matter, by what means he is to gain 
the opposite shore : plank, corks, cordage, sail or steam, any- 
thing will answer him. He commits himself to his star. 

Sometimes he has fits of stronger good sense than we often 
find in a Frenchman. He will kindle all of a sudden into 
indignation at some violation of the law, some waste of pub- 



220 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

lie money, or some grave and solemn insult to the national 
honor. His probity shrinks, his patriotism warms and boils 
UD. He stamps in his seat. He pulls his hat over his eyes. 
He draws his brave blade from the scabbard, and brandish- 
ing it with both hands, is going to demolish all before him ! 
But a Court breeze passes during the night over that {)atriotic 
and triumphant brow, and he yields to its whispering im- 
pulse. The lion, become lamb, now sheathes his claws, and 
is quietly led back to his lair. He still bleats a few low 
murmurs, and then lies down at the feet of his master. 

It ill becomes M. Dupin to open the strings of the national 
purse, but he does open them. He engages to speak against 
a certain side and he will speak, but for it. He promises to 
say, at once, the decisive word, and he will finish without 
ever concluding. He swears by his great gods he would 
make a tempest, and the zephyr is not gentler than the breath 
of his words ; , that he would go direct to the law, and he 
rests in the fact ; that he would treat one of the two ques- 
tions, and it is the other; that he would reason soundly on 
the principal thesis, and he even touches but upon the ac- 
cessory. At sea, the flow of the tide occurs not till twelve 
hours after the ebb. But in the head of M. Dupin, the 
flowing and ebbing toss his will, to and fro, within the space 
of even a minute. He is more mobile than the sea in a 
storm. 

One day an editor — it was not mine — wrote biographical 
sketches of all the deputies, and he placed and classified 
them : — who Ministerial, who belonging to the Opposition, 
who to the Left, who to the Right, who to the Centre, who to 
the -intermediate shades of opinion. But when he came to the 
letter D, and to the turn of M. Dupin, he knew not what to 
say of his opinion, nor what to do with his place, and was 
forced to omit him. Remark to the praise of the Chamber 
as of M. Dupin, that the latter was just appointed, almost 
unanimously. President of the Chamber, and avow, reader, 
that this is a charming trait of political life. 

M. Dupin affects still the obsolete distinction of being 



M. DUPIN. 221 

Gallican, and was much more concerned, in drawing up 
the Charter, to combat the Ultramontanists, than to see that 
the very principle of the government was not changed com- 
pletely. The Revolution of July having fallen into the hands 
of a man of this compass of mind, how would you expect 
it to turn out otherwise than it has done ? M. Dupin imag- 
ined that the people fought, beneath a burning sun, during 
three days, merely to encamp his master— Dupin's master- 
on the throne, and him, Dupin, on the bench of the Court 
of Cassation. Verily, the people had something better 
to do! 

M. Dupin has three antipathies— the office-seekers, the 
aristocrats and the military. He is in constant fear that the 
spurs of these last will tear the skirt of his gown, and he 
keeps a tight rein i;i the Chamber to the Military party. 

He is a man of some courage and he is not. He showed 
courage when his house was besieged by bands of ruffians, 
who threatened to assassinate him. He had none when he 
refused to plead before the Court of Cassation and the Cham- 
ber, against the abominable fortifications of the city. 

He is neither ambitious nor disinterested, neither without 
simplicity nor without ostentation. He pursues fortune 
ardently if she resists him, and if she offers herself he 
slights her favors. 

He has mind as much as possible and more, and he makes 
little account of it. But if you would please him, assure 
him that he has great constancy in his opinions, and he will 
believe you. 

He is more dreaded at the Tuileries than liked ; his visits 
there are rather tolerated than encouraged, for he is blunt 
in his manners and sarcastic in his language. He is a sort 
of peasant of the Danube in a court-dress. Look"* behind 
the door of the Salon de Diane, and you will see the hob- 
nailed shoes he left there on coming in. 

At Court, he is awkward and ill-mannered. He is offen- 
sive, by his drolleries, to princely susceptibilities. The ex- 
cursions of his volubility importune ; but he is allowed to 
19* 



22S REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

run at large, because it is known that he will return to the 
stall and let himself be caught easily by both the ears. 

M. Dupin is the most rustic of courtiers, and the most 
a courtier of rustics. Let us not mistake them, the cour- 
tiers of this species are not the least manageable. The 
outside of the bark is rough to the touch, but the inside is 
soft and smooth. 

M. Dupin entertains for his king all the affection of an 
attorney, and it is probable, that, in the intimacy of their au- 
gust conferences, his king is better pleased to converse with 
him upon the drawing up of a lease than about the genius 
of the ministers, and upon the arrangements of his house- 
hold than the polity of the Great Turk. 

Twenty times M. Dupin has been on the point of laying 
hold of the ministry. It has even been thrust into his hand, 
and he let it fall. He has the whims and humor of a child. 
He wishes, and he does not wish. He cries and weeps. He 
throws his arms around your neck with a sportive and con- 
fiding air, and then in an instant he retires to a corner in a 
fit of sullenness. He looks sheepish, and if you go near 
him, he scrapes you. 

He is bold, resolute, a fine talker in the green-room, but 
as soon as he mounts the stage, he stumbles, forgets his 
part, stammers, pulls his wig - over his eyes, and acts the 
mute. 

M. Dupin has long passed for being the leader of the 
Third-Party. Of the Third-Party ! what in the name of 
wonder, was this Third-Party ? 

It is known that after the death of Casimir-Perier, the tri- 
umphant majority broke down. The apostates of July, the 
shameless Legitimists, the sabre-wearers, the Court valets, 
the thorough-bred Doctrinarians, the ambitious functionaries, 
and the greedy speculators banded together apart and formed 
the bulk of the army. 

But some of the combatants began to desert, unwilling, 
through shame or prudence, to enlist under the ferule of the 
Doctrinarians. They beheld dawning in the future, a new 



M. DUPIN. 223 

minister, and twenty times has he been within their reach, 
and they have once even grasped, for some minutes, the 
shadow they were pursuing. This fraction of dissidents 
gave itself the title of Third-Party. What did it do, this 
party? what did it want ? had it officers? had it soldiers, 
and who were they ? It is said that seated on the outskirts 
of both the ministry and the Opposition, they leaned some- 
times to one side, sometimes to the other. But they con- 
cealed themselves so well that you might have worn out 
your eyes to discern them, and they passed so quickly from 
one principle to the other, that it was impossible to define 
their position. They did not betray each other, because 
they did not know each other. They did not count their 
strength, because they did not know whom they were com- 
posed of. They coveted power, but dared neither to take 
nor to keep it. They were ministers for three days, and 
after this they were nothing, neither ministerial nor Opposi- 
tion. No one could say whether they were alive, or dying, 
or dead. They had not strength to carry a resolution, a 
measure, a principle, and all their fecundity was but a suc- 
cession of abortions. Singular folks ! whom Providence 
had very probably constituted, like ourselves, of flesh and 
bone, who drank, ate, spoke and voted like the rest of mor- 
tals, and with whom we have communed, sat, discussed and 
legislated, a good moiety of the day, during whole years, 
without being able to say very precisely what was their 
name, and if they had one, nor what their opinions, or if 
they had any. 

No matter, the Third-Party passes for having existed in 
the days of fable, and M. Dupin for having been its valorous 
and eloquent chief. 

M. Dupin is one of those men whom it is unsafe to have 
for political friends, and undesirable to have for enemies. 
He is an embarrassment nearly as great to the ministry hG 
does not favor, as to that which he should support. He is 
not supple, conciliatory, insinuating enough to unravel the 
thousand difficulties of a thousand affairs. His mind is 



224 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

wrought into a hedging-bill which saws more than it cleaves. 
Were he minister, he would defer to the morrow the plan 
of to-day, and, in his moments of good-humor, would skewer 
all his colleagues on the point of his witticisms. 

M. Dupin would make a bad figure at the private parties 
of the Court, with the sword dangling at his side and the 
golden eaglet knotted upon his left shoulder, and he would 
be the first himself to admit the ridiculousness of his figure 
mounted Don-Quixote-wise, mailed all over in feudal armor, 
upon the poney of the Apanage. He should have left 
these heroical exhibitions to the knights of the sorrowful 
countenance. 

The flattery of others, which spoils presidents and kings, 
has also spoiled M. Dupin, who has not a little contributed 
to this result himself, and I profoundly pitied him when he 
showed himself so far gone as to tell us, in a fit of ludicrous 
vanity: " Gentlemen, you may believe it or not as you will, 
but let me assure you that I am the Demosthenes of the 
Tribune, the Cicero of the Bar, and the elder Cato of the 
fields." No, M. Dupin, we do not believe you ; for these 
three proud republicans whom you pretend to imbody, by 
yourself alone, would not have stooped to wear the livery 
of Louis-Philippe, and kiss the petticoat hems of the royal 
damsels. There is nothing in common, M. Dupin should 
know it, between a poor little court sycophant like him, and 
the glorious galaxies of Greece and of Rome ! 

Demosthenes, after having devoted to the infernal deities 
Philip of Macedon, died by the dagger of an assassin, em- 
bracing as he expired the altars of liberty, and M. Dupin, 
as far as we know, has no wish to hurl like imprecations 
against Philippe of Orleans, nor to die after the manner of 
Demosthenes. 

Cicero combated in the Roman Senate, that assembly of 
hir.gri, ihe knavish and plausible Octavius who had a hand 
and a word for everybody while he was meditating at the 
same time the subversion of the republic, and M. Dupin has 
lent himself as president to the purposes of a Chamber of 



M . D U P I N . 225 

speculators, office-seekers, attornies, court-dependants, and 
shop-keepers, which have not the least resemblance to an 
assembly of kings. 

In fine, Cato the elder lived on black broth in the frugal- 
ity of his country abode, and was scarce in the habit of 
making drafts at sight upon the treasury of Rome, while M. 
Dupin luxuriates amid flowers and wines, by the light of a 
thousand tapers, in his resplendent festivities, and hoards 
besides all that he can lay hands on of gold or paper money, 
after having once applauded the writer of this, for his cour- 
age in denouncing the abuse of hoarding. 

M. Dupin had never but a vulgar and easily-contented 
ambition. Tf he has aspired to no more than being Presi- 
dent of the Chamber, attorney-general of the Court of Cas- 
sation, and great-cross of the Legion of Honor, he ought to 
have made speeches and not pamphlets. If he desired to go 
down to posterity, he should have made pamphlets and not 
speeches. 

I do not mean to say however, that M. Dupin, for not 
being quite as eloquent as Cicero, nor as logical as Demos- 
thenes, is not a very remarkable extempore speaker. Doubt- 
less, his elocution lacks the skill of method, the elevation of 
thought, and the purity of form of that of Berryer ; but it 
is perhaps more substantial, more animated, and more pic- 
turesque. Examined closely, the sallies of M. Dupin are 
somewhat coarse, but at a distance they strike by their natu- 
ralness and their very rusticity. He draws his compari- 
sons from common things, from the habits of living, usages, 
manners, law terms and proverbial modes of speaking, and 
he throws his auditory into fits of hearty and national 
laughter. He has occasionally the eloquence of strong 
common sense, and after a manner entirely new, singular, 
original, admirable. 

Quick, passionate, full of fire, he electrifies an assembly. 
He does not let it breathe, and when he has a good cause 
and is in the vein, he prosecutes it with astonishing vigor 
and precision. Then all his ideas are connected, all his 



226 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

words weigh, all his proofs are deduced in regular sequence. 
Then is he solid, cogent, nervous, concise and luminous. 
Then M. Dupin is comparable to the most rational among 
our dialectitians, and the most vehement among our orators. 

Unfortunately, M. Dupin is often unequal, and falls into 
the low and the trivial. His imagination overmasters him. 
If a bon-mot chance to cross him while he gesticulates in 
the tribune, he seizes it on the wing, and holding it by the 
middle, hurls it upon the Chamber at the risk of hurting the 
first head it may happen to encounter. 

He has more manliness in his speeches than his princi- 
ples, more power of argumentation than of judgment, and 
more independence of head than of heart. He has passed 
through so many political events, and advocated truth and 
falsehood in so many and different causes, that it is not easy 
to say whether he has done more good or harm to the interests 
of liberty, nor also more harm or good to his own. 

This sort of orators — a rare kind in our day especially — 
are men of impulse, and who never speak better than when 
they speak at a moment's notice. They flutter, they fret 
themselves in their seat and take fire like a chemic match. 

Do you see that inflammable personage who enters the 
hall in a flurry? He sits, he rises, he fidgets about, he 
stretches out his hand to claim the tribune, he mounts it and 
perorates. Ask him not what was his object in commencing ; 
ask him not, above all, how he is going to close. Can it be 
that you would be surprised, should he speak for the meas- 
ure and vote against it ? Don't you know him to be a man 
who gives himself up to the current of his inspirations, with- 
out even a surmise as to whither they transport him 1 He 
sets out, and as he goes along, beats the bushes for argu- 
ments. 

Nevertheless — who would think it — M. Dupin still insists 
and wishes, against wind and wave, to pass for a man of 
constancy, of great constancy. 

Constant, upon what ? Constant, to whom 1 can he say ; 
and we ourselves ? Alas ! we cannot change our nature. 



M. DUFIN. 227 

Feeble and fickle mortals, we are that which the gods have 
made us. Each light has its shadow, each quality its de- 
feet. If M. Dupin had not his mobility, he would not have 
his talent. Would he be without the one, or the other 1 Be 
It so, but let him choQse ! 

I desire in closing, reader, to acquaint you very secretly 
with an embarrassment of mine, and to ask your advice ; 
stipulating, above all, that you must not go tell this to M. 
Dupin. You are to know then that the honorable legislator 
has voted at the Academy, against his own brother, for me, 
Timon, your unworthy servant and his. What am I to do, 
and blockhead that I am ! can it be a matter of doubt ? 
How, for the whim of being academician, I Timon of Athens, 
a painter without talent, but a man of sincerity, how should 
I prove delinquent to M. Dupin, to you reader, to myself, in 
suppressing the truth ? 

No, reader, I rather will charitably advise M. Dupin not 
to get himself bepraised so extravagantly, in the flattering 
biographies he writes of himself, or that he dictates, which 
is pretty much the same thing. 

How these men of intellect have singular ways ! M. Du- 
pin wishes absolutely to be something different from him- 
self It is his settled idea. He gazes coquettishly in his 
mirror, and changing countenance in proportion as he looks — 
the effect apparently of inveterate habit — he just now says 
to me : " It is not I whom you have sketched, I am not M. 
Dupin !" — How, you are not M . Dupin ? Why, I assure 
you it is you and no other who sat at this moment for the 
pencil of Timon. It is you I see, it is you I paint, it is you, 
it is certainly you whom I have just portrayed ! 

Come, let us see what you would have me do to appease 
you ? Do you wish me, for example, to say that other ora- 
tors have been as inconstant as you ; that the Greeks and 
Romans have fluctuated, neither more nor less than you, in 
their sentiments of the forum, the Senate and the closet ; 
that Voltaire, Pascal, Fenelon, Rousseau have varied their 
opinion upon all sorts of subjects ; in fine, and this will 



228 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

please you more, tliat there are to be found certain pam- 
phleteers — those cursed pamphleteers — who are said to have 
been at first Tories, afterwards radicals ; at first Legitimists, 
then quasi-republicans ; at first republicans, then Constitu- 
tionalists ; at first liberals, then monarchists ; at first mon- 
archists, then liberals ? Dead or living, give these what 
name you please, let me be placed with them in a common 
category ; do not consider me, act your will. 

But you will understand, M. Dupin, that, to gain your 
good graces, I cannot forfeit' those of the public, and spoil 
one of the best of my portraits. After all, if you be dissat- 
isfied, I am resolved, if I am not academician at your hands, 
to be so at my own, or rather at yours, kind reader ; an 
election well worth the other, is it not ? 

At the same time, I feel some compunctions of pity — M. 
Dupin will say it is remorse— and I should like, with your 
permission, reader, to console this poor sufierer and shed a 
little balm upon his wound. I should like to say, and it is 
but justice to mention, that M. Dupin is a man of excellent 
moral parts ; that he is generous, inoffensive, not vindictive, 
and of the last I am the proof; that he has a lively sense 
of justice and the law ; that he has independence, although 
a little stubborn ; that he is sparing of the public money, 
except, indeed, towards himself and his master ; that he is 
beneficent, charitable, and naturally friendly to the people. 

May I add to the picture this other trait, that he has a 
foible for the privileged classes, and yet does not love privi- 
lege ; that he has a foible for the Court, and yet he does not 
like either courts or courtiers. 

1 must, in fine, repeat — and upon this point M. Dupin will 
not think my recapitulation too long — that he is full of fancy, 
sarcasm, and sprightliness in familiar conversation, subtle 
and profound, clear, nervous and skilful in his pleadings, in- 
genious and original in his literary productions. 

Still a word to complete his portrait. 

M. Dupin's voice is full, grave, clear, modulated at the 
medium pitch, sometimes powerful and thrilling. His face 



M. BERRYER. 229 

is scarred, blotched, mangled, wrinkled. But when his 
physiognomy is in motion, enlivened by passion, wrought up 
by argumentation, it is devoid neither of elevation nor noble- 
ness. His deep-set eyes sparkle with fire, and gleam from 
the depths of their orbits like two diamonds ; and really, I 
do not call this being an ugly man. 

Note, reader, that this is quite fresh from the pencil and 
mere appendix. Will M. Dupin be satisfied ? he ought to 
be certainly ; yet you will see that he will not unless I say 
that he is consistent. Well, no, I will not say it ! 



M. BERRYER. 

It is just, it is lawful that all the varieties of the political 
opinion of the country should be represented in the Chamber 
of Deputies. The Chamber derives its moral authority from 
the illustrious of its members ; and of what service would 
be to the minister himself an incompetent and ridiculous 
legislature, which he might lead in his train amongst the 
baggage of his household. 

The Legitimist party have done what intelligent minori- 
ties should always do : it has supplied the number by the 
quality. The deputies which it has selected are men of 
eloquence and probity. They are dignified in deportment, 
prudent in conduct, polished and measured in language, and 
their doctrines are never urged but with all the urbanity of 
parliamentary propriety. 

But they are placed in a false position. They have been 
sent to the Chamber by their party to hoist there the white 
flag, and as soon as they display the smallest glimpse of this 
flag, the universal tempest which rises and rages compels 
them to furl it with all speed. They have therefore to place 
themselves in the wake of the Opposition, to tag themselves 
to its coat-skirts, to imitate its language, to talk like it of 

20 



230 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

liberty, of large liberty ; and these are expressions rather 
strange, rather new upon their lips, words which would have 
passed for seditious in the reign of Charles X., and which 
accord, in fact, neither with the principle nor with the acts 
of his government. These liberal professions are distrusted, 
appearing to be rather a stratagem of opposition than the 
expression of a sincere conversion. It is feared that the 
Legitimists would soon put off the mask if Henry V. were 
to return, and that as they are now but for liberty, they 
would then be but for power. 

The Legitimist deputies form, in the Chamber, a separate 
band. It is a miniature church, having its invariable dog- 
mas, and where they chant in chorus the praises of their 
lord and master. They bear some resemblance to the chil- 
dren of Israel, separated from their country, and who wept 
in the secrecy of the tabernacle, the exile of their God and 
the subversion of their temple and their holy laws. 

At their head, and the most distinguished of all, shines 
M. Berryer. 

M. Berryer has long been the sole orator and almost the 
sole deputy of his party... Not that there is not in the 
Chamber a certain number of shameless Legitimists who 
group themselves high in the centre, and who would not fail 
to turn to account their quasi-legitimacy, were Henry V. to 
appear, the white flag in his hand, within twenty-five or 
thirty miles of Paris. But these disguised Legitimists re- 
veal but at the ballot their secret predilections, and, at all 
other times, they bind so well the mask of the Juste-millieu 
about their visage, that it is quite impossible to tear it off. 
If, in the first legislatures, M. Berryer, carried away by the 
heat of improvisation, used to let slip some regrets a little 
too lively for the absence of his king, these renegade Legiti- 
mists were the first to raise a murmur of displeasure. But 
in the lobbies, they dropped this part, and if they met M. 
Berryer alone, would shake him by the shoulder, squeeze 
discreetly his fingers, and say : " Oh ! how you are right, 
M. Berryer ! Go on ; we are at your side ! Who would 



M. BERRYER. 231 

not sigh for those excellent princes ?" M. Berryer might 
admire the great prudence of this noble conduct, but he 
must harve desired a little more support when he ascended 
the tribune. 

Perhaps, too, that sentiment of indulgence, of decency, of 
generosity, which, especially in a French Chamber, is felt 
towards a courageous champion contending alone against a 
battalion of adversaries, has proved of more advantage to M. 
Berryer than could have been the adhesion of a numerous 
party. Perhaps the very difficulty of this extraordinary 
position has given to his talent additional energy and lustre, 
as the jet of water is seen to issue the more vigorously, the 
narrower the tube that contains it. 

Berryer is, after Mirabeau, the greatest of the French 
orators. Yes, not one, since Mirabeau, has equalled Berryer : 
neither General Foy, who used to recite, rather than extem- 
porize, and who did not unite the close reasoning of business 
to the powerful voice and the copious eloquence of Berryer ; 
nor Laine, whose sole recommendation was a harmonious and 
pathetic delivery ; nor de Serre, who, heavy and involved 
in his exordiums, gave expression but at rare intervals to his 
oratorical passion ; nor Casimir-Perier, who was vehement 
only at an apostrophe ; nor Benjamin Constant, who had 
more of suppleness and art than of grandeur and energy; 
nor Manuel, in fine, who was endowed with a sure and firm 
judgment, but who, more a dialectitian than an orator, never 
wrung like Berryer involuntary bursts of applause from 
the charmed and enraptured auditory. 

Nature has treated Berryer as a favorite. His stature is 
not tall, but his handsome and expressive countenance paints 
and reflects every emotion of his soul. There is a fascination 
in the soft gaze of his full and finely-cut eyes, his gesture is 
marvellously beautiful like his delivery. He is eloquent in 
his whole person. He sways the assembly with the bear- 
ing of his head. He throws it backward, like Mirabeau, 
an attitude which gives a prepossessing openness and can- 
dor to the aspect. He is perfectly at ease in the tribune, 



232 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

and takes possession of it as if he were the master, I had 
alnnost said the despot. His breast swells, his bust dilates, 
his stature rises, and you would imagine him expanding to 
the dimensions of a giant. His wrinkled forehead glows, 
and when his head is vehemently agitated, a strange circum- 
stance ! the blood is seen to ooze from the pores of the face. 

But that in which he is incomparable and beyond all the 
other orators of the Chamber, is the tone of the voice, the 
first of beauties in the actor and the orator. Men in assem- 
blages are extremely sensible to the physical qualities of the 
speaker or the comedian. Talma and Mademoiselle Mars 
owed their fame but to the charm of their voice. Give them 
a common voice, and whatever might have been the profun- 
dity of their acting and the exquisite sentiment of their art, 
they had lived and died unknown. It is by the vocal pow- 
ers, frequently more than by the arguments, that an assem- 
bly is moved. 

But M. Berryer's pre-eminence is not due alone to the 
accident of his external qualities. He is also a master in 
the oratorical art. Most other speakers abandon themselves 
to their extempore inspirations, and, in the disorder of their 
excursions, they fall upon some fine movements, but they are 
destitute of method. It is not always clear, and they don't 
know themselves, where they start from and whither they 
would go. They rest themselves on the route, and halt to 
reconnoitre the way. Berryer's superiority here is, that 
from the threshold of his discourse, he sees as from an ele- 
vated ground, the goal whereto he istending. He does not 
precipitate himself upon his adversary. He begins by 
drawing around him several lines of circumvallation. He 
routs him from post to post. He deceives him by feigned 
marches. He approaches him gradually — he pursues him 
— he surrounds him — he seizes him — he strangles him in 
the concentric coils of his argumentation. This is the 
method of capacious intellects, and it would soon fatigue 
an audience so inattentive as a French Chamber, if M. 
Berryer did not fix its levity by the charm of his voice, the 



M. BERAYER. 233 

animation of his gesture, and the noble elegance of his dic- 
tion. 

Mirabeau became himself but under the stimulus of con- 
tradiction and obstacle. His element was in governing rebel- 
lions and revolutions. He was a wrestler, a man of conten- 
tion; He was never so grand as in the full glow of the battle. 

Mirabeau was besieged with murmuring to the extent of 
being interrupted. Berryer, on the contrary, speaks amid a 
a silence not merely attentive, but in some sort respectful. 
He is listened to, and you would fancy his sympathizing 
auditory repeat in low chorus the notes which flow from 
that beautiful and melodious instrument. 
' He enthrals the assembly, he submits it to his will, like 
the subject of the magnetizer who is made to speak, be silent, 
walk, stop, pursue, sleep; but if he once awake, the spell is 
broken. In like manner, when the assembly arouses itself 
and descends the steps to go vote — material interests, party 
principles or passions resuming the ascendant — it ballots 
against the greatest of our orators as if it had only heard one 
of the officers of the Chamber cry : " Silence, gentlemen !" 

Berryer powerless, deserted as he is in the sphere of his 
principles, can do nothing but by taking sides with the lib- 
eral Opposition, and availing himself of the weapons of that 
Opposition which he wields to admiration. 

He questions, he presses, he nonplusses his adversary, in 
order that he may be thrown off his guard by the confusion, 
and pierced on the spot in default of the cuirass. A fact, 
a document he shivers to its base, but he is careful not to 
subvert it entirely, it being enough for his purpose that it is 
unable to sustain itself, in such its shattered condition. The 
doubts he expresses pass for so many affirmations to his au- 
ditors ; but ministers can make no more of them, against 
him, than mere doubts, and he thus deprives them in advance 
of part of the advantages of their reply. 

Should some speculator in the secret funds of police, 
should some intimate of the Court kitchen, feeling himself 
hit to the quick, emit from his oesophagus a dumb and cav- 

20* 



234 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

ernous groan. Take no notice that he interpellates the 
orator, lest Berryer, in turning about to see who per- 
mitted himself thus to reply, should knock him over with 
the back of his mallet. But if some minister mutter a tan- 
gible interruption, M. Berryer retreats a little backwards in 
the tribune ; and then springing upon him as upon a prey, 
he shakes him, he tosses him aloft, and letting him fall 
back, he nails and cakes him upon his seat by a crushing 
reply. 

His vast and faithful memory supplies him without effort, 
with the most complicated dates, and he can put his fin- 
ger, without hesitation, on the scattered passages of the nu- 
merous documents which he is analyzing and which fortify 
the tissue of his discourses. 

Nothing can equal the variety of his intonations, at times 
simple and familiar, again bold, pompous, ornate, piercing. 

There is nothing bitter in his vehemence, nothing offen- 
sive in his personalities. 

He extracts from a cause all that it contains both of spe- 
cious and solid, and bristles it with arguments so close and 
so captious, that you know not by what side to approach or 
to take it. After he has gone through the series of his 
proofs, he pauses a moment ; then he accumulates them 
upon each other into a pile under which he overwhelms his 
adversaries. 

A man of the world, a man of dissipation and pleasure, 
and of a jovial character, M. Berryer is not naturally labo- 
rious. He has, however, great aptitude for business. No 
man, when he wishes, can more thoroughly master a ques- 
tion, collect its details with a more curious investigation, or 
arrange them into a more learned and methodical whole. 

It may be that, in the profusion of his diction, he is not al- 
ways quite correct ; but this defect, common to all our par- 
liamentary improvisators, does not prejudice the effect of 
the discourse. We have already said that our orators are 
not to be analyzed or read, but must be heard. Their fame 



M. BERRY ER. 235 

would be much greater, if the press did not reproduce them. 
They have an enemy in every reporter.* 

Since the Revolution of July, the long and large career 
of our orators has been marked by some gleams of genius, 
some pithy axioms, some brilliant thoughts, some witty ex- 
pressions, some phrases of effect, some oratorical effusions ; 
but there has not been a single discourse which would pass, 
in print, for a veritable model of eloquence. They have 
been preserved all of them, printed in the public collections, 
edited superbly, aye, even gilt-edged, but nobody reads 
them. 

They are like an uncorked jar, whence the ambrosia 
should have evaporated, and which should be no longer 
worthy of being served up on the table of the gods. 

The Pythoness too is beautiful on her tripod and in her 
temple ; but elsewhere, she is merely an old woman, naked, 
decrepit, and in whom we now behold but her . ugliness and 
her rag's. 

Yes, the printer has killed the orators, and were I in M. 
Berryer's place, I would prosecute by all legal means, even 
that of the correctional police, whatever editor should do me the 
wrong and injury of publishing my speeches; and this even 
though he should produce before the court my signature at 
the bottom, o^ jit for the press ; for, of course, he could have 
extorted it but by treachery or by surprise ! 

But what then, there would remain ofM. Berryer but the 
name! Well! what" remains, T pray you, of Talma, of 
(m'lle) Mars, of Paganini ? What remains of Apelles, of 
Phidias, of the comedies of Menander, of the sighs of Sappho, 
of the wisdom of Socrates, and the grace of Aspasia? A 
name alone, a name ! 

Nothing more ; and for M. Berryer, for his glory, this is 
enough. Go now, drag this orator from his sacred tripod, 
and hawk him without 'inspiration or voice, throufrh the 

* This may be true of the French orators ; and is so, no doubt, of all 
real orator)-. But there are orators, whom we wot of, to whom, on the 
contrary, the reporter is the best of friends.— Tr's. N. 



236 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

streets in some rag of a newspaper ! Reproduce, if you can, 
by a reporter, that inimitable voice which sends a thrill of 
delight through every finer organization ! Mark, when he 
brings such physically in communication with him, how he 
imparts to them, by a sort of electricity, the vehement emo- 
tions of his own soul ! He is not only an orator by his pas- 
sion and eloquence, but moreover a musician by the voice, 
a painter by the eye, a poet by the expression. 

M. Berryer does not imitate those deputies of the Restora- 
tion so sentimentally silly, whose sole reply to the argu- 
ments of the Opposition was the exclamation : " I love my 
king, O my king !" M. Berryer does not content himself 
thus, and if he too loves his, of which we have no doubt, at 
least he makes no display of it for ostentation. He avoids, 
like a man who_knows his audience, to tread upon the burn- 
ing coals of dynastic personalities, and prefers to engage 
in the higher themes of national interests, wherein'his talent 
has full scope to soar and spread its pinions. He does not 
set himself to justify, item by item, the blunders of the Res- 
toration. He avows them, and from the brilliant profusion 
of his historical reminiscences, he demonstrates that the pre- 
ceding governments, in consequence of their delinquency to 
the eternal duties of justice, have all been wrecl^d upon the 
shoals and scattered by the tempest. This manner is full 
of grandeur, and permits the genius of Berryer to sweep 
freely in the elevated region of principles. It is also full 
of tact, for without appearing to intend any reference to the 
ministers, it leaves the auditors themselves to make imme- 
diate and special application of the general objections of the 
orator. 

M. Berryer does not ask indulgence to the dogma of Le- 
gitimacy. He does not defend what is not, what cannot be, 
admitted to debate in the Chamber. But he changes the 
point of attack and combats the ministry with their own 
weapons. He presses them, he pushes them from conse- 
quence to consequence to the last extremities of parliamen- 
tary argument ; and, with the sovereignty of the people in 



M. B E R R Y E R . 237 

his hand, he corners them in their violation of the Charter 
and the perjury of their oaths of office. 

So then, every defender of the fallen powers who have 
oppressed France, is obliged, in order to throw dust into the 
eyes of the world, to invoke the sacred name of liberty. 
Ah ! let us not complain of this abuse ! There must surely 
be truth in our cause, since our adversaries themselves con- 
fess it. It must needs have force too, since they come to 
temper in it their swords and even their bucklers ; and the 
tardy homage of the Legitimists advances the Liberal inter- 
est as much as the combined treacheries of the Camarilla and 
the Doctrine. 

Nevertheless, we must not deceive ourselves. In heart, 
M. Berry er has not our principles, and on his lips he has not 
even his own. Yes, his real principle — that vivacious and 
glowing Legitimism which consumes him — he does not de- 
fend in the tribune ; he compresses it within himself, he 
hides it and seems to dread its explosion. He throws him- 
self into the byways, as if he feared to walk upon the high 
road of Goritz, as if for him this road was barred across, 
and bordered with abysses and precipices ! He does not 
attempt to reason, to discuss, to prove. His is an eloquence 
of impulse rather than of dialectic, of action more than of 
thought, of sentiment more than of demonstration. It is 
Berryer, it is an orator, a great orator you hear, but it is 
not a Legitimist. He is not a politician, he is an orator, I 
repeat ; one of those orators who cannot be said to be 
within their own control, who are at the least as much over- 
mastered, as they overmaster you, by their ecstasy, who can- 
not resist their own excitability, like M. Thiers, like all ar- 
tists of delicate organization. 

Think not that he seeks, that he solicits these inspirations, 
they arise spontaneously. He trembles through every limb, 
from head to foot. He is moved, he weeps, he rages, he 
droops, he sinks beneath the emotions of the Chamber as 
well as his own. Once within the popular current, he can- 
not remain there. He rolls with the torrent, he roars with 



238 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

the tempest, you feel that he cannot brook the narrowness 
of his own principle ; that he spurns the chains wliich fet- 
ter him ; that he wants air, that he wants room, that lie 
wants a Carlist auditory; and without air, without room, 
without an audience, Berryer is not in his element. He 
must fire the spectators to passion, pour abroad his soul, 
disport himself in the billows of his harmonious voice, tra- 
verse immensity, and expand himself freely in his august 
flight. Then will he forget that he is a Legitimist, to re- 
member but that he is a Frenchman. Then will he be- 
come national. Like Antceus, to reinvigorate his powers, 
he falls back upon the generous soil of country. He plunges 
into, he disappears in the splendor of France, and returns 
with his head encircled in a magnificent halo. He leads the 
assembly around our map. He marks on our frontiers Italy, 
Switzerland, Spain, Prussia, Belgium. He represents us 
environed by a girdle of steel, of foes and desolations, and 
in his patriotic enthusiasm, he exclaims : " I thank the Con- 
vention for having saved the independence of France." 

Again, he revolts at the cowardly concessions of our diplo- 
macy, and, with his hand extended over the tribune with a 
gesture of singular expressiveness : " This hand," says he, 
" will wither before casting a vote which may say that the 
ministry are duly jealous of the dignity of France. Never ! 
never !" 

And as if unable to master his oratorical emotion, he 
turns incidentally to M. Thiers, and says to him : " I honor 
you, sir, because you have done two honorable acts, in sus- 
taining Ancona, and resigning your place. By what dis- 
tance soever we may naturally be separated, only promote 
the interest and the grandeur of France, and you shall al- 
ways have my applause, because after all I have been born 
in France, and I mean to live and die a Frenchman !" 

On another occasion he represents Russia and England 
contending with each other for aggrandizement, and his in- 
dignation is kindled to find his brave, his glorious France 



M. BERRYER. 239 

remain an impotent spectator of their contests and of the 
partition of their conquests. 

"Behold that vast antagonism, political and military, 
which extends from the frontiers of Tartary along to the 
shores of the Mediterranean, between two nations who must 
one day meet one another in mortal conflict. Behold, from 
the extremity of the earth along to our borders, Eng- 
land arraying her warlike barriers against Russia, by whom 
she is menaced in turn on the confines of her magnificent 
Indian colonies. Consider those grand expeditions to the 
distance of five hundred leagues fromlhe national territory ; 
on the one side, the expedition to Caboul, on the other, the 
attempt upon Kiva. Observe these two great nations march 
across the globe to erect their lines of precaution against one 
another. What, gentlemen ! and France, is France to be 
but a Continental power, despite of those vast seas which 
come to roll their billows upon our shores, and to solicit, so 
to say, the genius of our empire and our intelligence !" 

This is a fine image, and M. Berryer, like all the great 
orators, particularly affects the figurative style in all the 
processes of his eloquence. 

There are, in fact, several modes of acting powerfully 
upon public assemblies. The speaker may address himself, 
either to their logic by the vigor and conclusiveness of his 
reasonings, or to their wit, by the vivacity and piquancy of 
his expressions, allusions, and repartees, or to their hearts, 
by the emotions of sensibility, or to their passions, by vehe- 
mence of invective, or to their imagination, by the splendor 
of rhetorical figures. But most frequently it is by means of 
figure, of imagery, that eloquence produces its greatest 
eflTects. The prosopopoeia of the warriors who fell at Mara- 
thon, by Demosthenes — the Roman citizens affixed to the 
infamous gibbet of Verres, by Cicero — the night, the terrible 
night when the death of Henrietta broke upon two kingdoms 
like a thunder-clap, by Bossuet — the avenging dust of Ma- 
rius, the apostrophe of the bayonets and the Tarpeian rock, 
by Mirabeau — the " audacity, audacity, always audacity," 



240 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

by Danton — the Republic that, like Saturn, is devouring its 
own children, by Vergniaud — the voice of liberty re-echoed 
from the lakes and mountains, by O'Connell — the car which 
conveys the remains of Ireland to the grave, by Grattan — 
the turban which marks on the map the place of the Turkish 
empire, by Lamartine — Algeria, of which the fruit does not 
present itself even in blossom upon the tree so copiously 
watered with our blood, by Berryer — the fathers of the Re- 
volution, those noble spirits looking down upon us from the 
heights of Heaven, by Guizot ; all this is the eloquence of 
imagery. 

What a pity that Berryer, that so powerful an orator, does 
not fight in the Liberal ranks, at the head of the popular 
party ! How is it that such an intellect does not perceive 
the inanity of the doctrines of Legitimacy ? How is it that 
he does not labor with us in the ways of liberty, for the 
emancipation of mankind ? How happens he not to com- 
prehend that the principle of the sovereignty of the people is 
the sole true one, that alone which reason acknowledges, 
that alone which the future of all the nations will glorify ? 

Already Napoleon, Chateaubriand, de Lamenais, Beran- 
ger, have proclaimed the future era of the European repub- 
lic. Unfortunately, the orators are not as far-seeing a^ these 
great men. They absorb and waste themselves in the petty 
passions and prejudices of the moment. They are content 
with playing upon the instrument of speech, the airs of the 
day which meet their ears. They trifle away their time in 
amusing on the quarter-deck of the vessel the group who 
stand around them and clap their hands. But they do not 
cast their eyes over the vast expanse of the surrounding seas. 
They do not examine the direction of the wind or the course 
of the stars, nor do they seek in the distance to discover the 
coasts where the weather-beaten vessel that bears humanity 
must at last find a port. 



/ 



/ 







''L .^ S^ ^ [P^ T D [Ra [E 



V 



LAMARTINE. 241 



LIBHARY \ 



'M^^^^'' 



Whex^ a Parliament is divided but between two princi- 
ples, such as that of nationality and that of privilege, the 
lesser shades of opinion fade away, the individualities disap- 
pear, and there is in presence one of the other but two stand- 
ards, two camps, two armies. This was our situation under 
the Restoration. The Chamber, which is but a large mirror, 
reflected then, as it will always reflect, the out-door opinions. 
The orators of the Right represented the nobility, the clergy, 
the magistracy, the royal guard, the functionaries and the 
Court. The orators of the Left represented the students, 
the soldiers, the middle burgess class, the bar, the artists and 
the people. 

But when, as at present, privilege, under the name of 
legitimacy, dares not hold up its head for fear of seeming 
to be retrogressive, and nationality, under the name of sove- 
reignty of the people, dares not unfold itself for fear of 
passing for revolutionary, there can be no common ties, no 
definite doctrines, no staff, no capacious tent where the chiefs 
might meet to concert their plans for the campaign. There 
will be almost as many generals as soldiers. Each arms, 
equips, costumes himself according to his fancy. One wears 
a shako, another a white crest ; the third a red-cap, the next 
goes without a cockade. Each makes war on his own ac- 
count, posts himself in the plain or on the mountain, fii*es on 
the right or the left and wastes his powder and ball. 

This parliamentary pell-mell images exactly the confusion 
of our actual society. The young dream of republican 
institutions. The mature regret the glorious order of the 
Empire. The nobility, and* in part the clergy, invoke 

21 



242 " REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

Henry V. The artizans and laborers want work. The 
electoral body want monopoly. The burgess class want 
repose, they care not how or under whom. The military 
party want despotism. The Doctrinarian party want power 
and pelf. The national party want liberty and equality, 
and the socialist party do not know what they want. 

What then is this socialist party ? The socialist party is 
a medley of Saintsimonianism, Quixotism and a bastard Lib- 
eralism, dazzling with words and destitute of ideas. 

Each party desires to have in the Chambers a represen- 
tative of its opinions, because the finest theories remain, out- 
side the Chambers, but mere theories. But in the Cham- 
bers, when they triumph, they take the name and authority 
of laws and are turned to practice. But, all opinions, by 
the invincible tendency of human affairs, point to some ap- 
plication. There is not an Utopia, even the wildest, that 
does not pretend to realize its visions. Those who begin 
with disinterestedness strive to end with power. 

The socialist party has not been behind others, and imag- 
ined it found a representative in M. de Lamartine. 

There are two personages in M. de Lamartine — the poli- 
tician and the poet ; but as the politician is but the reflec- 
tion of the poet, it will be proper first to define the latter. 
But here is the manner in which the most accredited critics 
of my time define and estimate M. de Lamartine. 

France, say they, has had its revolutions in literature as 
in politics. In the days of Montaigne and Amiot, our tongue 
was little else than Greek and Latin written in French. It 
would seem the lips of these writers still clung to the dugs 
of antiquity, replete with milk so pure and abundant. 

The style of the age of Louis XIV. attains the perfection 
of full-grown manhood. It has maturity, vigor and color- 
ing, majesty and grace. It is forcible without being strained ; 
original without being quaint ; simple without being vul- 
gar; pompous without being pedantic. One imagines see- 
ing still the Greek blood flow in its veins which it swells 
and blues beneath the translucent skin. 



L A M A R T I N E . 243 

Subsequently, the invasion of a host of philosophical and 
industrial terms, as well as the derivatives from the British 
and Sclavonic idioms, spoiled the language while enriching 
it, as a river, swollen by the mixture of several streams, is 
apt to lose the limpidity of its fountain. 

Voltaire, however, kept alive the sacred fire of ancient 
literature, and he is, by the universality of his knowledge, 
his exquisite purity of taste, and the justness of his under- 
standing, immeasurably above all our living men of letters — 
a thing which they, we well know, will not allow. 

There is more true philosophy in a single page of Vol- 
taire than in all the pages together of MM. Cousin, JoufFroy 
&; Co., who strive far too much after the sublime and the 
profound. Voltaire is one of the latest masters of good 
sense. Do you know what one of the Lycophrons of our 
day, who dig for their style underground, makes a reproach 
to this Voltaire, this puny genius? Why, that he is too 
luminous ! So is the sun too luminous for moles. 

In like manner as our literary prose, our poetry bears no 
longer any resemblance to the ancient poetry. It is no more 
one of the graces whom the brilliant genius of Athens used 
to crown with flowers. It is a howling spectre that rattles 
its bones at you from the cavity of the tombs. 

M. de Lamartine seems to have thrown his entire poet- 
soul into his first meditations. He sung, and Naples — the 
voluptuous Naples — appeared to breathe in his verses. 
Those beautiful shores of Italy, those Isles of enchantment, s 
those odoriferous breezes, those languishing plaints of love, 
those softening notes that flowed from his lyre, threw us into 
a sort of vague and melancholy sadness. It was neither 
"^ure like antiquity, nor severe like Christianity, nor positive 
like the age : but it was a poetry tender and dreamy which 
had a charm like the passing of an autumn shade, the mur- 
mur of a billow, the sighing of a virgin, the moanings of a harp. 

Had there but been in those times a little literary criticism, 
M. de Lamartine, who knew how to write, would have 
learned to think. He sings too negligently. He outrages 



244 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

the grammatical connection of words and the rational con- 
nection of ideas. He affects constantly the same note, a 
monotonous note. He employs constantly the same color, 
the azure color. It is the azure of the eye, the azure of the 
firmament, the azure of the sea, azures, always azures! 
He selects a tomb-stone, he turns it on every side ; he takes 
its square and cube ; he delineates and colors the smallest 
blades of grass that grow around it ; he depicts one by one 
the leaves of the cypress that overshadows it ; then he wears 
away the stone with his knees, his tears, and his lamenta- 
tions. He counts upon his watch the pulsations of a dying 
person. Dead, he takes him, dissects the flesh, trepans the 
skull, and cracks the bones. But is not this the grief of an 
anatomist rather than the grief of a poet, a grief true, deep, 
natural, genuine ? Oh ! how much are we more touched 
to hear Malherbe cry : 

Elk etait de ce monde^ ou les phis belles choses, 

Ont le pire destin, 
Et rose* elle a v'tcit ce que vivent les roses, 

U espace dhm matin ! 

A child of earth, where darkest doom 

Awaits the pure and fair, 
A rose, she bloomed, as roses bloom, 

But one brief morning there. 

To describe, to analyze, like Dubartas and Rensard, the 
most secret beauties of a woman, the eyebrows and iris of 
her eyes, the moles of her skin, the enamel of her teeth, the 
veins of her bosom, the delicacy of her figure, even with 
aceompaniment of some languishing metaphysics, this is but 
to relapse to the infancy of the art. 

* I remember an anecdote respecting this passage, which seems worth 
relating, if only to mitigate the well-known wrath of authors against 
" printers' devils." The subject of the poem was named Rosette ; and the 
line ran originally : Et Rosette a v^cu, &c. But the poet it seems omitted 
"to cross his fs'' (not having been a printer, or editor, or school-master,) 
and the proof sent him read /?oseZZe; which instantly striking his fancy, 
through the ear probably, produced the present form, which is the greatest 
beauty of the verses. — Tr's. N. 



LAMARTINE. 245 

Praxiteles did not surcharge his Venus with coquettish 
ornaments, with roses, pink flowers and ostrich feathers. 
He put no paint on her cheeks, and no rubies on her fingers. 
He drew her bare-, but decent, beautiful, and in the sim- 
plicity of nature. All the greatest geniuses have been 
characterized by simplicity — all — Homer, Virgil, Racine, 
Shakspeare, Raphael. 

The true poets have been as great logicians as the philos- 
ophers. Who has better known the human heart than Mo- 
liere, better painted than old Corneille the grandeur of vir- 
tue, better sighed than Racine the subtle weaknesses of love ? 
Who had ever a sounder taste, a more exact intellect, 
than Voltaire ? And in our own day, can the government, 
the bar, or the tribune produce a man with a correcter judg- 
ment than that of Beranger ? It is that poetry, true poetry, 
is but reason ornamented by imagination and rhythm. 

Unfortunately, this cannot be said of the poems of M. de 
Lamartine. He utters some sublime cries, cries of the 
soul. He brings out some unexpected notes, which ravish 
the ear. But also, what a disorder of imagination ! what a 
multitude of false and broken notes in his melody ! what 
profusion of ambitious epithets ! what abuse of description, 
of inversion, of metaphor, and color! Of plan and arrange- 
ment, not a trace. Of dramatic progression, not a step. M. 
de Lamartine seems to have forgotten that words are not 
ideas ; nor the clash of sounds, harmony ; nor confusion, 
science ; nor physiology, sorrow. If the French should be- 
come a dead language, and M. de Lamartine should go 
down to posterity with the other poets of the decline, he will 
be found, from the incoherence of his thoughts and his style, 
one of the authors the most difficult to be explained, and will 
one day be the despair of school-boys and commentators. 

Such is the judgment of the critics upon M. de Lamar- 
tine as poet. But he is judged still more severely as deputy 
by the puritans of the Left, and here is their estimate. 

M. de Lamartine, as a political orator, lives upon his 
poetical reputation. There is nothing of passion, nothing 

21* 



246 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

of inspiration in his aspect, gesture, or voice. He is dry, 
measured, sententious, cold. He shines but does not warm. 
He is religious but has no faith. He does not feel his heart 
throb, his lips tremble, and his speech take fire and life. 

It is not that M. de Lamartine is distinguished in his 
poetry by the qualities of the ages of Augustus and of Louis 
XIV. — the learned disposition of the plan, the preservation 
of the characters, the nice gradation of art, the skill in de- 
tails, the purity of the touch and outline, the sequence and 
justness of the thoughts. But here, at least, the constraint 
of metre and rhyme, forces his ideas into some degree of 
order, which is not observed in his speeches. His oratorical 
style is flat and fluent, and rocks from one leg to the other. 
Still more glittering than brilliant, more monotonous than 
harmonious, more inflated than full, he lacks the free, ease- 
ful, firm, and natural step of well-written prose. He can- 
not march without a baggage of unmeaning epithets. He 
abandons the idea to pursue the pleasing sounds of the ear 
and the effects of prosody. He delights and dwells com- 
placently in the euphonious terminations. He drowns his 
thoughts in a deluge of tropes and metaphors, and his par- 
liamentary motions always end with the tail of a strophe. 
If by your melodious phrases you only mean to give us mu- 
sic we would quite as lief go hear Rossini. M. de Lamar- 
tine is to our good orators what rhetoric is to eloquence. 

Parliament is not a theatre where actors may come to 
utter their flute-like amplifications and flowing periods, for 
the amusement of the spectators. You say you represent 
the people ! Speak then as the people would who should 
speak properly. 

M. de Lamartine may astonish the country-members by 
the scintillations of his coloring, but he offends the delicacy 
of men of taste. Deliberative oratory has its rules and its 
beauties, which are not the rules and beauties of lyric poe- 
try. The style of the orator should be full, but perspicu- 
ous. His thoughts should be lofty, but simple. They should 
move and be combined in a precise and logical order. But 



L A M A R T I N E . 247 

M. de Lamartine is diffuse and redundant. He has neither 
profundity of ideas, nor vigor of argumentation. You meet 
people, however, who take his parliamentary dithyrambics 
for eloquence. With reason, indeed, is it said that we are 
in the midst of universal anarchy, for not only has France 
lost all political virtue, but moreover that which she had 
maintained in all vicissitudes, she has lost her good taste. 

We go farther : the oratorical phraseology of M. de La- 
martine has more of show than of body, more splendor than 
depth, more variety than vigor, more sonorousness than sub- 
stance, more copiousness than precision, more development 
than connection. 

Far be it from us not to render full justice to the moral 
and religious sentiments of M. de Lamartine, to his lofty 
character, his amiable qualities, and his noble heart. He 
has ever a generous word to oppose to the arbitrary and vin- 
dictive proceedings of power, and we thank him for these 
inspirations of his virtue. But as he is ignorant of the lan- 
guage of business and does not attack abuse on its practical 
side, nor descend to applications, the ministers willingly leave 
him to wander and lose himself in the vague of his orations. 
They laugh scornfully at your fine sentiments. 

Though M. de Lamartine should preach to them the whole 
day long, Bible in hand, about parliamentary moralities, 
what effect, tell me, could that have upon the mammon- 
worshippers of the ministry ? They have never had any 
pretension of getting to heaven by means of their good 
works. Ah ! my God, provided they are left in peace upon 
earth, with their oflices, their secret funds, their telegraphs, 
their bottle, and their treatises of America, of the East, of 
Africa, they ask no more. 

Let a poet, if he will, sing, upon the same lyre, of the 
sufferings of the Cross and the mysteries of Isis ; let him 
celebrate in the same strain the purity of Christian virginity 
and the voluptuous graces of the yellow-haired Nesera ; let 
him, about the same time, write enthusiastic odes to Napo- 
leon and solemn hymns to liberty, there can be no objection. 



248 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

Passions of the heart, diversity of character, fall of empires, 
heroes, wars, festivals, natural scenery, flowers, volcanoes, 
tempests, zephyrs, thunder, ocean, sky, stars, immensity, 
the whole universe is legitimate ground. 

But when the poet turns deputy, when he deigns to sit 
with the herd of his colleagues on the benches of Parlia- 
ment, he is asked, and he is asked rightfully : Whence do 
you come, what principles do you espouse, what office do 
you look for ? The business here is not to sing, to keep 
gazing on the blue firmament and perch in the clouds. Are 
you man or bird, angel or demon ? Do you dwell in heaven 
or upon the earth 1 Do you mean to be a Legitimist, a Re- 
publican, or an ambassador ? Come, speak, that this may 
be known, and you accordingly denominated. 

You inform us that there are two standards, the white and 
the tri-colored. We know this well ; but what we do not 
know is, to which of them you belong ? You sound upon 
your theorbo equally the praises of the republican soldiery 
and of the Vendeans ; but on which side do you plant your 
tent ? You shed floods of evangelical tears over the hard- 
heartedness of the ministry, and then, when comes the mo- 
ment to ballot, a sort of heathen change takes place at the 
end of your fingers, and the white ball slips through them ! 
You support bad laws to secure the good-will of the minis- 
ters, and you say these bad laws are good for nothing, in 
order to please the Opposition ! You philanthropize about 
the wants of the French working-class, and you make them 
pay American philanthropy twenty-five millions ! You laud 
the minister for having maintained what you call public 
order, and you blame him for prosecuting those who express 
their indignation at this sort of order ! You were an ad- 
mirer of the great Perier, the small Thiers and his com- 
pany, and then when the small Thiers asked your support 
for the secret funds to the end of continuing in office the 
subject of your admiration, you refused peremptorily the 
secret funds ! You stigmatize slavery, and, at the same mo- 
ment, you hold that society may put the citizen in chains ! 



LAMARTINE. 249 

You profess negro-emancipation, and you vole the govern- 
ment money and soldiers to prevent that emancipation ! You 
plead eloquently the cause of foundlings, and lament the 
wretchedness of the people, and you take ground against the 
conversion of the interest accruing from the money of the 
people! Try, then, to reconcile a little ..better, though at 
the risk of displeasing the ministry, your peroration with 
your exordium, and your conclusions with your premises ! 

But where M. de Lamartine has completely forgotten 
himself, was when he was led by some strange and inexpli- 
cable caprice, to defend the Disjunction law. In any other 
country and v/ith any other Chamber, a ministry which 
should permit itself to procure the escape of the culprit 
while bringing to trial the accomplices, would have been 
itself impeached for violation of the law. If the Strasburg 
Jury did not unanimously acquit the companions of Louis 
Bonaparte, it would have been v/anting to the divine law 
which is the law of conscience, and to the civil law which 
is the law of reason. M. de Lamartine, in defending this 
stupid and abominable Disjunction law, has erred through 
want of judgment — a thing that does not surprise us ; and 
also through defect of heart — a thing which has afflicted 
those who love him. After this, put your trust in poets ! 

His whole discourse, in this unfortunate debate, was but 
a tedious vagary and a heap of contradictions and incon- 
sequences of every sort. He declares that beyond all things 
he loves liberty and equality, and he delivers the most aris- 
tocratic speech of the session. He stigmatizes the Disjunc- 
tion law by calling it a legislative Coup d' Etat, and yet he 
votes for this ministerial trick. He respects the immuta- 
bility of the Charter, and he wants a second constituent As- 
sembly. He wishes to preserve the country, and he excuses 
an armed attack upon that country. He has but just learned 
the distinction between connexity and indivisibility, and he 
disserts, like Bartholus, upon this distinction of transcen- 
dental jurisprudence. He insists upon obedience to the laws, 
and he saps the inviolability of the Jury. He reproves mil- 



250 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

itary revolutions, but he would resign himself to popular 
revolutions, provided, behold you, that they occurred only 
now and then j and the rest of the speech is of the same 
calibre. 

For the rest, M. de Lamartine was not here in his proper 
element, and it is no wonder that he has rambled from his 
subject. How should he be expected to speak the language 
of business ? he does not know even the cant of it, happily 
for his muse. But he sometimes, not always, shines in lite- 
rary questions, which have constituted the study and the 
glory of his life, and in questions of sentiment, which is the 
poetry of noble hearts. 

We respectfully listen, when M. de Lamartine, a religious 
bard, chants a hymn to religion. We laugh, when M. 
Thiers, a frivolous scoffer and a Voltarian sceptic, invokes 
the divine Providence. It is that the one believes in some- 
thing, the other in nothing. 

But, if M. de Lamartine, in place of chanting, attempts to 
reason, it behooves us to see that his argument does not of- 
fend against the rules of logic, and also not to receive his 
figures, as conclusive, without verifying the arithmetic. 

M. de Lamartine approaches sometimes nearer the truth 
than the other speakers, carried away as he is, uncon- 
sciously, by the inevitable consequences of the principles 
which he lays down, and he is left uninterrupted to finish 
expressions of a radical tendency, which Garnier-Pages 
would not be permitted to begin. It is that a parliamentary 
auditory attaches no serious importance to the opinion of 
poets. It knows that they pursue in politics, through the 
affairs of society, as in poetry, through the fields, the shad- 
owy or sunny caprices of their imagination ; — like those 
harps of ^olia which, suspended in the sacred groves, used 
to tremble languidly to the breath of the zephyrs, or vibrate 
sonorously to the blast of the storm. 

Let M. de Lamartine not deceive himself: if the Cham- 
ber lends him a general and kind attention, when he speaks 
of literature and morality, it is, that, by a secret self-corn- 



LAMARTINE. 251 

placency, there is not a single deputy, ministerial or puritan, 
who does not pique himself upon being a man of sense and 
taste. But too often, while M. de Lamartine is advocating 
human literature, he falls into the rhapsodical. It seems as 
if he made up his discourse of broken hexameters, ear- 
cadences, and unfinished phrases. Aegri somnia. 

A cloud-traveller, he delights in a sort of aerial and 
quintessential metaphysics, which he imagines to be social 
science, and which is in fact but a sort of dreamy deism ap- 
plied to the things of earth. He constructs, in his visions, defi- 
nitions of it so irregular, that the meaning defies all analysis. 

Take, for example, his theory of Literature : 

" The beautiful is the virtue of tlie intellect. In restrict- 
ing its worship, let us beware of impairing the virtue of the 
heart." 

What is to be thought of M. de Lamartine retailing, in 
full Chamber, such enigmatical nonsense, and what think 
you especially of the hypocritical deputies who gave it their 
applause ? 

Strange, but too common perversity of noble minds! M. 
de Lamartine holds himself in high esteem but as publicist, 
and perhaps as financier. He disdains his quality of poet. 
What is it, for M. de Lamartine, to be a poet ? It is only 
for pastime that he calls for his lyre, and if he was ap- 
prised that the nine Muses were up stairs and expected to 
hear from him, he would carelessly take up his pen and 
deign to write them in verse, as M. le Due de Broglie too 
condescends sometimes to write in prose. 

We do not deny that the talent of M. de Lamartine pos- 
sesses considerable readiness and versatility. He improvi- 
sates, he retorts even with a brilliant facility, sometimes 
with great happiness of turn and expression, always with 
that conviction by so much the more animated and the more 
dangerous to the generality of assemblies, and to the orator 
himself, that he doubts of nothing, because he discerns, in 
the hasty and consequently incomplete vision of his imagi- 
nation, but one half the object, while the other escapes his 



252 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

ken. In poetry, M. de Lamartine flings his sheets to the 
printer, as in prose, his speeches to the auditory, just as the 
matter occurs to him, as fast as he can put it on paper and 
without concerning himself about what goes before or what 
follows. In one word, M. de Lamartine does not work suf- 
ficiently ; and without the long, persevering and profound 
meditations of study, there can be no logical solidity. But 
it cannot be too often repeated to writers and parliamentary 
speakers, It is hy logic onhj they can hope to live.'^ 

Our representative government has been so arranged that 
people of imagination are little adapted for it. Our legisla- 
tion has a technical language which it is necessary to have 
acquired. It bristles with law terms, frequently barbarous, 
and founded upon scholastic subtleties. Hence, the large 
number of acute and crafty lawyers in the Chambers. 
And they are there in their proper sphere. For to make 
laws is to discuss, and they are eminently men of discussion. 
We will not say however with Plato : take the poets by the 
hand, and afier having crowned them with flowers, conduct 
them politely to the frontiers of the republic. We will not 
say with Paul-Louis Courier, that in general literary men, 
in office, lose their talents without gaining a knowledge of 
business ; nor with Lafitte, that M. de Lamartine might be 
a great poet, but that he was not a great logician. 

At the same time, we are forced to admit that the poets 
are rather out of place on the bench of Correctional Police, 
in the Council of State, in the Stamp and registration ofiice, 
or even in the capacity of ambassadors. We should greatly 
scandalize M. de Lamartine, were we to pretend that a vil- 
lage mayor, in wooden shoes if you will, possessed of sense 
and experience, would govern more wisely than he the 
affairs of the nation, and yet we should not scruple to af- 
firm it, and we would find many to believe us. 

* A maxim which should be inscribed upon every temple of education 
of the age, and which will become more and more evident and operative 
with the progress of scientific philosophy and intellectual civilization. 

Tr's. N. 



L A M A R T I N E . 253 

If M. de Lamartine should deem us puritans rather se- 
vere, it is that he ought not to have left his natural vocation, 
and that having turned statesman, it is our duty to say what 
we think of the inconsistencies of character and conduct of 
the statesman. 

When a man desires social amelioration, he should desire 
political amelioration. When a man knows anything of 
logic, he does not speak for a measure, but in the end 
to conclude against it. When a man is deputy, he ought to 
know what he wants, what he is, what party he sides with, 
what principles he supports. He who loves glory sincerely 
will twine but for glorious brows the laurels of poetry. He 
who loves the people sincerely, will not ask for them bread, 
but labor, respect and equality. He who loves liberty sin- 
cerely will not vote with its enemies ! 

Such are the reproaches, classical on the one hand, politi- 
cal on the other, which the critics and the puritans address 
to M. de Lamartine, as poet, as orator, and as statesman. 
Let me be allowed, in turn, to consider him under these three 
aspects. 

Beyond doubt, M. de Lamartine is not a poet of a classical 
taste. He has not been cast in the mould of the antique 
Apollo. But he is the greatest extemporizer of verses in 
the French language. He is original, as all men of genius 
are, in his own way. He is negligent, but he is simple, 
precisely because he is negligent. He sports with the 
rhyme and the measure, transforms, moulds and adapts 
them to all his inspirations, to his every fantasy. The celes- 
tial spheres roll not through immensity with more harmony 
than his verses. The rivulet flows not through the meadow 
with a gentler murmur. The bird is not fresher in its ear- 
liest song. The lakes of Sicily, ruffled by the languid 
breezes, do not lighten, at night, with purer or softer rays. 
And it is not alone his voice that sings, it is his soul that 
sighs and speaks to mine the mystic language of sympathy, 
that vibrates through my frame, that thrills my whole being 
and inundates me with floods of tenderness and tears. It 

22 



254 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

is his meditation that transports me on wings of flame, into 
the regions of eternity, of death, of time, of space, of thought 
never before visited by me, and which gives expression to 
metaphysical truth in a language picturesque, sublime, 
seraphic. 

I know not if the caesura of his verse is not sometimes 
broken, if his rhymes be always perfect, if the idea be not 
expressed with confusion, with contradiction, if the chords 
of his lyre do not render everlastingly the same tone, — and 
I do not wish to know it. Do not the paired oars beat the 
wave with an equal and measured cadence 1 Do I com- 
plain that the linnet warbles over and over the same sweet 
song ? Does not the nightingale intoxicate me always — 
undiminishedly — with its melody, beauty with her gaze, and 
the violet with its fragrance ? Do I turn away my ear from 
the distant sound of the waterfall, and my eyes from the 
unchanging splendor of the stars ? How should the soul 
that suffers not emit eternally the same cry ? The mother 
who has just lost her son, does she not love to pour the incon- 
solable repetitions of her grief? In like manner, am I to 
expect Lamartine to prove, in a melodious syllogism, the 
abstract truth of his song ? No, I ask him to rave upon his 
lyre and I rave, to sigh and T sigh,, to love and I love, to en- 
joy and I enjoy ! 

Who could deny, without injustice, that Lamartine and 
Victor Hugo have enriched with their brilliants our poetic 
crown already so effulgent? Both irregular in their march 
and rebellious to the restraints of grammar. Both no doubt 
more attentive to the word than the idea, to inversion than 
simplicity, to novelty than method, to the surprising than to 
the natural, and sometimes to the rhyme than to the reason. 
Both a little somniferous in their monotony, somewhat stun- 
ning by the hubbub of their raptures. But both powerful 
intellects, original geniuses come to reinvigorate our ex- 
hausted literature. The one throwing off flame and sparkles 
like an East-Indian carbuncle ; the other sighing like the 
harp of Fingal amid the desolate heaths. The one uncon- 



L A M A R T J N E . 255 

trolled In his lyric impetuosity, too prodigal of his force and 
wealth, extravagant, fantastic, sometimes sublime ; the other 
more religious, more meditative, more enveloped in allego- 
ries and symbols, more in communication with heaven and 
singing as if he prayed. The one torturing his rhyme and 
violating the Muse, whom the other caresses. The one, 
with bent arm, seeming to draw with effort from his bow, 
inflated and victorious sounds ; the other abandoning him- 
self like a limpid stream to his facile and flowing genius. The 
one more precise, but more attempered with the philosophical 
moralities ; the other more inspired, but more mystical. The 
one, with more dramatic skill, interweaving man in the 
scenes of nature ; the other more tender, more feeling, more 
persuasive, more eloquent in depicting the sentiments of the 
heart and the mysterious labyrinths of thought. The one 
more dazzling, more thundering than the bolt which leaps 
from crag to crag, and displodes in a thousand flashes amid 
the deep gorges of Hemus ; the other more pensive, more 
visionary than the virgins of Israel along the banks of the 
lonely river that severed them from their country. The 
one going to the intellect, the other to the heart ; the one 
suited to the sex of reason and action, the other to the sex 
of feeling and of love. 

What ! after having abolished the absurd property qual- 
ification, wherefore should we not send to sit on the legisla- 
tive benches, by the side of the poet Lamartine, the poet 
Beranger, and the poet Victor Hugo, and the poet Alexan- 
der Dumas, and Lamenais, and Chateaubriand, who also are 
great poets ? And were I to see there a score of celebrities 
in the physical and natural sciences, in music, painting, 
sculpture, and the arts in general, I should be rejoiced at it 
for the honor of my country. This brilliant elite of talents 
and genius, without prejudicing the fundamental and more 
serious business of the legislature, would stipulate also for 
the moral, intellectual, scientific, and artistic interests, which 
are not less precious, not less dear to France than the finan- 



256 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

cial and material. That which best represents France, is 
that which does her honor. 

I know not whether it be predilection for men of mind,' 
natural equity, or parliamentary vanity, but assuredly I 
would not exclude from the Chamber, suppose it in my 
power, such adversaries as Guizot, Berryer, Thiers, Lamar- 
tine, Jaubert, and other leading men, and I am not, 1 own, 
sufficiently exclusive, sufficiently partisan, to be unwilling 
that all opinions should be represented by the superiorities 
of their selection, or to hinder from shining in Parliament, 
with the reservation of combatting their doctrines, the illus- 
trious men of my country. 

It is also well — to return to our poets — it is well that their 
generous voice should protest from the tribune, against that 
odious death penalty whicli was the subject of so much croc- 
odile weeping in certain high quarters, and which has since 
been forgotten so quietly with all the rest. It is well that 
they interpose between the political parties who assail each 
other without measure or mercy, and that they awaken some 
pity, if not some remorse, in the hardened soul of the issuers 
of relentless orders, the creators of taxes which devour the 
poor people, the slayers of men after the third citation. 
Such is my conception of the mission of the parliamentary 
poet, and a beautiful mission it is, and you are, Lamartine, 
quite worthy to fulfil it ! 

Console yourself if you are not as great a politician, as 
good a logician as your flatterers tell you, as you think you 
are yourself, and as you would be wretched to believe that 
others did not think you. Console yourself, for poets are they 
not always in need of consolation ? If you had not your de- 
fects, you would not have your qualities ; if you were not 
changeable, you would not be impressionable ; if you were not 
impressionable, you would not be poet ; if you did not emit 
harmonious sounds, you would not be a lyre ; if you had 
the precision of prose, you would not have the cadence of 
verse ; if you had the logic of reasoning, you would not 
have the exquisite vagueness of sensibility ; if you had the 



LAMARTINE. 257 

I 

purity of outline, you would not have the richness of color- 
ing ; if you knew the language of business, you would not 
know the language of angels ! 

Yes, Lamartine, console yourself for not being, as some 
pretend, the first of our statesmen, and as I would be almost 
tempted myself to believe, seeing that this would be no great 
matter. Your lot is sufficiently fortunate, and for my part, 
' I would prefer four or five of your strophes to the whole pile 
of their parliamentary harangues, your own included. You 
will live, illustrious poet, when the actual leaders of oratory 
will be forgotten, they and their works, and when perhaps 
two or three names will float down the stream of time, the 
sole survivors from the vast wreck of our ephemeral govern- 
ments. You will live, and our children's children, in 
musing at the mid hour of a beautiful night, will love to 
recite these stanzas which fall with all the grace and the 
softness of the snow-flake. 

Doux reflet d' un globe de fiamme, 

Charmant rayon, que me veux-tu 1 
Viens-tu dans nion sein abattu, 

Porter la luraiere a men a,me'? 

Descends-tu pour me reveler 

Des mondes le divin mystere, 
Ces secrets caches dans la sphere 

Ob. le jour va te rappeler'? 

Une secrete intelligence 

T'adresse-t-elle aux malheureux '? 
Vieos-tu, la nuit, briller sur eux 
• Comma un rayon de I'esperence 1 

Viens-tu devoiler I'avenir 

Au coeur fatigue qui t' implored 
Rayon divin, es-tu 1' aurore 

Du jour qui ne doit pas &mr1 

Mon coeur a ta clarte s' cnflamme, 

Je sens des transports inconnus ; 

Je songe a ccux qui ne sont plus — 

Douce lumierc, es-tu leur ^mel* 

„■ i '—— 

* I deemed it proper to present this poem in the original, the beauties, 
for which especially it is commended by our author, being of those whif^h 

90* 



258 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

This is the place to say that M. de Lamartine is tall, hag 
blue eyes, the forehead narrow and prominent, the lips thin, 
the features aristocratic and regular, the port elegant, the 
gestures noble and a sort of stateliness a little stiff of the 
grand seigneur. The women, charmed with his sentimental 
melodies which touch so well their souls, look out but for him 
amid the multitude of the deputies, and ask each other : 
Where is he ? 

Where is he ? Happily it is not in the clouds of the So- 
cialist party. He has slipped down from it by more than 

elude even the best translation. Now, however, with the proof-sheets 
before me, and the messenger waiting, I am tempted, for the use of 
the popular reader, to try a running version of it, which shall pretend 
to give no more than the sense, the substance. For such it has, La- 
martine being something more than sound. His sentiments are always 
natural and noble: so unlike the epileptic sentimentalism introduced by 
Wordsworth, who succeeded in erecting a school of poetry (forsooth !) 
upon the poetic and intellectual imbecility of the age — contorsion being 
much more imitabb arRi general than grace. 

Mild image of a globe of flame. 

Fair orb of night, what would'st with me 1 

Or send'st thou to this breast thy beam 
To light its depths of misery 1 

Descend'st thou, to my soul to bear 

The mysteries high of worlds above, 
Those secrets hidden in the sphere 

Where day will soon thy light remove 1 

Some secret sorrow thou hast known 

Does't lead thee on thy heavenly way % 
>Come'st thou, by night, to beam upon 
The unhappy with Hope's cheering ray '\ 

Shew'st thou the future's veil undrawn 

To wearied hearts who thee implore % 
Oh ray divine, art thou the dawn 

Of the bright day that ends no morel 

My heart enkindles at thy beam, 

I transports feel before unknown, 
I muse on those now but a dream — 

Sweet orb, art thou their spirit's throned — Tr's N. 



L A M A R T I N E . 259 

half his body. He has furled his wings, he has alighted on 
tlie earth, and deigned to mingle with his brother mortals. 

As orator — for I have to consider him under this second 
aspect — M. de Lamartine has been rising from year to year, 
and is at present in full possession of parliamentary glory. 
He possesses a happy and lively turn of imagination, a 
memory capacious, simple and fresh, which retains and ren- 
ders promptly whatever has been committed to it, which is 
not disconcerted by interruption, is always self-possessed 
and follows, without missing the way, the uncertain thread 
of a thousand windings — a rare and wonderful faculty of 
appropriating to himself the ideas of others which has per- 
haps not its like in the Assembly — a perception distinct and 
vivid of the difficulties of each subject — a richness of color- 
ing, which is bespread in the shape of flowers, waves, golden 
clouds, over all his speeches — a fine development of well- 
connected phrases — an improvisation free and well sustained 
— a power of pointed reply, a cadence, a volume, a harmony, 
an abundance of images, sounds, movements which fill, 
without fati^uiniJf the ear, and bear so close a resemblance 
to the loftiest eloquence, that it might well be mistaken for 
something of the kind. 

For me who prefer, in Parliament, I must say, argument 
to oratory, logic to imagination, the language of affairs to 
that of the muses, I would be more affected by a masculine 
and nervous discourse, than with these melodious and roseate 
embellishments of style. But I must agree too that this 
pomp of language which would in others be elaboration, 
affectation, empty rhetoric, is entirely natural in Lamartine. 
He extemporizes as he sings. It is pure lyrical effusion, 
fresh from the fountain, without adulteration and without 
effort. 

I like his balanced and rhythmical phraseology, though 
it be more fit to deliver the oracles of Apollo than to express 
the passions of the Forum. I like it because it rolls along 
the slime of the river with a sort of sweet and plaintive la- 
meniings, like the scattered limbs of Orpheus. I like it be- 



260 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

cause if it is not the prose of oratory, that grand and beau- 
tiful prose which 1 can nowhere find, it is at least the prose 
of poetry. There is wanting but the rhyme, and to relieve 
us from the provincial patois of our parliamentary honora- 
bles, much do I desire that the poet legislator should address 
us occasionally in verse. Take up thy lyre, O Lamartine ! 
for my ear is still full of the gravel of their jargon. For 
God's sake, verses, verses ! 

Less an orator than a poet, less a statesman than an ora- 
tor, I have now to view him in this third and last quality. 

M. de Lamartine is too much under the dominion of his 
imagination, which leads him back and forth through the 
labyrinths of a thousand systems. We know pretty nearly 
what it is he does not wish. Thus, he does not wish Legiti- 
macy, nor the Empire, nor the Republic, nor the aristocracy, 
nor the Camarilla ; but what he does wish it is not so easy 
to ascertain. Here is, at any rate, his principle, and com- 
prehend it who can : It is " The organic and progressive con- 
stitution of the entire democracy, the diffusive principle of 
mutual charity and social fraternity, organized and applied 
to the satisfaction of the interests of the masses." 

Verily, for the audacious temerities of this new Charter, 
M. de Lamartine needs not dread incurring the application 
of the September laws (against libellous and treasonable 
writings,) not being summoned by M. the Attorney-general 
of the King, before M. the Judge of instruction, sitting in 
his chambers at the Hall of Justice. 

But if, to put in practice these grand and misty theories, 
M. de Lamartine coveted as he does covet, a high post in 
the executive authority, I know him better than he knows 
himself, and would lay a wager that, before the end of three 
months as ambassador or minister, he would be thoroughly 
disgusted, and sigh for a return to his wandering and be- 
loved independence. The poet-man is thus constituted ! 

For the sake of his own fame, of his peace, of the affec- 
tion of his friends, it is to be wished that M. de Lamartine 
may be neither minister nor ambassador. He does not know 



A MARTIN E. 261 

the masters and the footmen, the high profligates and the 
low profligates with whom he would be under the necessity 
of mixing and living. He does not know to what they can 
descend in their professions. He does not know what they 
can dare in their fears. He does not know how often their 
touch has already polluted pure and innocent and elevated 
reputations. He is not made to be their dupe. Still less is 
he made to be their accomplice. 

The interested caressings of power, these transports of a 
poetic imagination, these tactics of poetry, these inconsisten- 
cies of doctrine, these aberrations of logic, can never per- 
vert the fundamentally excellent character of Lamartine. 
By instinct, by sentiment, he is generous, charitable, de- 
voted to the people, impatient of the theories and conduct of 
the humanitarians, ready at all times to say and to do what- 
ever is useful, elevated, and national ; independent and 
courageous in his opinions, sometimes even on the border 
of being radical ; in fine, without a particle of gall upon 
those lips, with the simplicity of the poet and an honesty of 
•heart which has something in it of virginal. 

No, whatever may have been too often the error of your 
politics, of your vote, and of your speeches, no, Lamartine, 
you cannot hate liberty, for yours is a noble soul ! No, 
you are not so unhappy as to believe that government can 
with impunity be unjust, violent, and corrupt ; that hu- 
man affairs are controlled by hard and blind necessity ; that 
the sanction of a principle resides but in its triumph, and 
that revolutions purchased with the blood of the citizens 
ought to lead to no other lesson and no other consummation, 
than the cowardly oppression of the people. 

Shame upon those doctrines, and I love to believe, La- 
martine, and do believe from my heart, that you do not 
share them, that you shudder at them, that you loathe them, 
and that you would repeat with us, shame upon those doc- 
trines ! for, as you know, we are not of those who pass 
from camp to camp, according to the caprices of victory. 
We plant our banner on the broad ground of country. We 



262 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

wish liberty, not in phrases but in things ; not in the lies of a 
Charter, but in the realities of political life ; not in the privi- 
leges of some, but in the equality of all. We cannot believe 
that truth is condemned to covenant with error, that the eter- 
nal laws of justice and morality have ceased to govern the 
world, that principles are reduced to beg favors from neces- 
sity, that the insolence of the fact ought to prevail over the 
right, or that the sovereignty of the people can pass away. 



^ 







© aj] D- s ©. 1^ 



GuizoT. - .■^,.. 263 



I IJBRAR.Y f 

GUIZOT. 



M. GuizoT is of a low and slender figure, but nis aspect 
is expressive, the eye fine, and his gaze is singularly full of 
fire. In his gesture and mien there is something severe 
and pedantic, as you see in all professors, and especially 
those of the Doctrinarian sect, the sect, that is, of pride. 
His voice is full, sonorous and aflirmative ; it does not obey 
flexibly the varying emotions of the soul, but it rarely fails 
of being clear and audible. He wears an exterior of re- 
markable austerity, and everything about him is grave, 
even to his smile. This severity of manners, of deport- 
ment, of maxims, of language is by no means displeasing, 
particularly to foreigners ; perhaps because of its contrast 
with the levity of the French character. 

He is a pedagogue in his chair, with whom the ferrule is 
ever peering from under his robe. He is a Calvinist in his 
pulpit, cold, sententious, morose, who inculcates the fear 
rather than the love of God. 

M. Guizot is accomplished in literature, a distinguished 
historian, and holds the highest placfe among the publicists 
of the English school. He is particularly well-versed in 
the languages ancient and modern. He has not the impos- 
ing manner of M. Royer-CoUard ; but he has a greater 
abundance of ideas ; he is more comprehensive, more 
practical, more positive. You perceive at once that he has 
mingled more in the management of men's affairs. 

Like all the preachers of the Genevese school, of that 
school characterized by its acrimony and harshness, he pro- 
ceeds, in method as in manner, dogmatically. He neglects 
the ornaments of diction. He lacks variety imagination 



264 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

and liveliness, but not energy. His passion discovers itself 
in the brilliancy of his eyes and transpires upon the marbly 
paleness of his countenance, which it colors and tints of a 
sudden. But it is absorbed as quickly, and is in general 
more concentrated than exterior. He looks the Opposition in 
the face with front erect. He points at them with a haughty 
gesture, and hurls against them those pregnant sarcasms 
which leave rankling in the wound their venomous darts. 

M. Guizot treats political questions from a certain ele- 
vated point of view. It was the manner of his master, 
M. Royer-Collard. He selects an idea, formulizes it into 
an axiom, and erects around this axiom the scaffolding of 
his reasonings. He reverts to it incessantly ; he makes 
this idea the sole object of view, he draws to it, he rivets 
upon it, the spectator's attention. His oration is but the 
development of a theme. If the idea be true, the whole 
discourse is true ; if the idea be false, the whole discourse 
is false. But the deputies of the partisan majority to whom 
he addresses himself never allow that the thesis is false, 
and so M. Guizot retains in their estimation all the advan- 
tages of his method. 

These advantages are considerable in deliberative assem- 
blies. For it is not with a multiplicity of ideas that you 
can best sway an auditory more or less inattentive, but 
with a simple idea, skilfully chosen, elaborated, dogmatized 
and presented under all possible forms. Accordingly this 
is the usual method df professors, and we must not forget 
that M. Guizot and Royer-Collard have filled the professorial 
chair. A professor who should not repeat himself, would 
not be understood ; no more would he be comprehended, 
were he to formulize before his auditors a long string of 
axioms, for their attention would thus be distracted. The 
professors then from necessity all embrace this method ; 
they carry it with them, through instinct and habit, from 
the chair to the tribune. 

M. Guizot speaks at inordinate length, like all professors; 
he argues scholastically in the manner of the theologians. 



GUizoT. 265 

He is • monotonous like the former, opinionative like tlie 
latter. He loves to deal in abstractions, and does not 
scruple the employment of equivocal terms, such as " mid- 
dle classes," "quasi-legitimacy," "legal country," "armed 
peace ;" and when he falls upon one of these formulas, he 
fastens upon it. drops the fact, loses sight of land and soars 
into the region of generalities, where it happens to him not 
unoften to dissolve away and evaporate. 

M. Guizot would have acted excellently the part of high 
priest ot' the Druids, in the sacred groves of our ancestors. 
He would have perfectly intoned in Celtic hemistiches their 
enigmatical oracles. His respectful disciples would not 
dare, at that day, to penetrate the tabernacle of his genius. 
They would have to prostrate themselves aloof, and adore 
him at a distance. 

M. Guizot is fond of abstract theory in politics and 
philosophy. But as he has not sensibility of soul enough 
to believe vividly, nor logic enough in the intellect to deduce 
rigorously, he but too often leaves the question at the point 
where he took it up, without having carried it a step 
beyond. 

His Eclectic doctrines beset him, overmaster and buffet 
him on every side with their changing billows. He spreads 
his sail to the four winds ; and it must be that he raises 
some terrible tempests in his mind. In politics, he is a 
believer neither in the legitimacy of the right divine, nor 
in the sovereignty of the people. In religion, he is neither 
Jew, nor Mahomedan, nor Protestant, nor Catholic, nor 
Atheist. In philosophy, he is neither for Des Cartes, nor 
for Aristotle, nor for Kant, nor for Voltaire. Is he a pro- 
fessor of religion however 1 Yes, but of what creed and 
worship ? Is he a Deist ? How shall I tell you ? I know 
nothing of the matter — and he himself, does he know more ? 
Is he a philosopher ? Yes, but of what sect ? Is he a liberal ? 
Yes, but of what party ? No matter, he will set himself, 
by a mere play upon logical forms, in all these things to 
amalgamate the contraries. Thus, will he blend the purity 

23 



266 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

of democratic principles with tiie corruptions of his mon- 
archy. He would have the two adverse religions, not only 
tolerate one another in the matter of their co-existence, but 
farther accommodate each other in the matter of their 
mysteries, and make their Easter communions together at 
the same altar. 

His admirers, amid the darkness wherein M. Guizot has 
enveloped them, feel but a void, grasp but shadows without 
flesh or bone, and yet you hear them cry : We hold them ! 
You hold what ? truths ! I defy you to bring them forth from 
the clouds of your phrases and show them in open day. 

Alas ! for twenty years back, your disastrous, your fatal 
school of Eclecticism has swayed our youth, of whom it has 
depraved the generous instincts, of whom confused the 
sprightly and pure intelligence, hook around you ! That 
school has produced but sophisticated understandings, but 
hearts without faith, without fire, without patriotism, hearts 
which the nobler sentiments have never expanded, which the 
thirst of selfish and brutal pleasures consumes, which the 
anguish of doubt is wasting away, hearts extinct, dying, 
dead ! 

Ah ! I can overlook M. Guizot's faults of statesmanship. 
In the space of three days, a government, a dynasty, a con- 
stitution may be overthrown, as M. Guizot, the conservative, 
who has overthrown them, knows better than I do ; a less 
time than this were sufficient to repair a ten years' career 
of error and shame. 

But this moral and systematic poisoning of the soul, this 
perversion of the lettered generations, this hideous leprosy, 
this intellectual gangrene, this distemper never known to 
our fathers and which will bow the degenerate impotence of 
our children beneath the sword of some usurping despot — 
this malady, who will cure it ? Is it your disciples nipped 
with a precocious and lingering consumption who could be 
adequate to the manly struggles of liberty ? Is it those in- 
tellects petrified by your doctrines who could be expected to 
advance boldly in the progressive march of the human 



G u I z o T . 267 

mind ? Is it those enervated arms, those dastard spirits who 
could serve for bulwarks to our independence, or even for 
instruments to a glorious despotism ? And yet you are aston- 
ished that the priests endeavor to rescue from your guidance 
those remnants of souls whom you have failed to save ! 

Yes, the fathers of the modern school, with their misty 
importations from Geneva, Berlin and Scotland, have spoiled 
our philosophy, our youth and our language. If it be the 
fate of this beautiful French dialect to pass one day into the 
state of a dead language, we give notice to posterity that 
Messrs. Guizot, JoufFroy, and Cousin, these three chiefs of 
the public instruction, these three professors of quintessential 
metaphysics, will to them be untranslatable, since to us, their 
contemporaries, they are unintelligible. 

^ M. Guizot, to express ideas which are not ideas, has made 
himself a language which is not a language ; a language 
all inflated with false propositions, all bristling with barren 
and indefinite terms; a language elaborate without profun- 
dity, affirmative without certainty, ratiocinative without 
logic, dogmatical without conclusion and without proof, dull 
to move, inspissated with saliva, and which moistens scarcely 
the parched and bloodless lips. 

But when M. Guizot quits the pen and mounts the tribune, 
his thought flows freely and clearly, without losing any. 
thing of its breadth or its gravity ; it becomes colored without 
being overcharged with ornament ; it acquires body from 
being nourished with facts and examples ; it proportions it- 
self to the common comprehension ; it developes itself and 
advances in an order at the same time natural and erudite. 
How are we to explain this contrast in the man and this 
strange transformation of the manner of thinking ? Mio-ht 
it be that the writer, in his cabinet, is within his own con- 
trol, that he retains all his individuality, that his uniformity 
of thought is unbroken by external influences, whereas an 
audience with its passions, its ideas, its language even, will 
always force itself upon the recognition and modify the dis- 
course of the orator ? 



2G8 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

It is certain that when once M. Guizot descends from his 
cloudy theories and enters the region of practical affairs, he 
is distinguished by a lucidity of idea and expression which 
has not been duly appreciated. He goes directly to the 
point and says only what is necessary, and says that well. 
As an agent for the government, he has been the most re- 
markable of all the agents we have heard these twenty years. 
As a minister, he has defended his administration with more 
precision, science and ability than any other minister. 

His elocution, with little of vehemence or coloring, is pure 
and chastened. He is perhaps the only one of our extem- 
pore speakers whose reported discourses are supportable in 
print. The reason is that he is the most philological and 
lettered amongst them. 

M. Guizot never surrenders ; he is mailed all over, and 
has not a flaw in his armor through which the shaft of ob- 
jection may penetrate and wound. But no more is he en- 
dued with those happy ebullitions of passion, those boundings 
of the heart, those flights of imagination, those touching 
thoughts, those animated turns which flash forth from the 
genuine, the great orator, which ravish himself beyond him- 
self, transport him by his own emotion and transfuse him 
into the souls and the very vitals of the auditory. M. Gui- 
zot is not what is called eloquent. He has however been 
so once, when, in a rapture of admiration for the Constitu- 
tionalists of 1789, he exclaimed : " I cannot doubt that, in 
their unknown abode, these noble spirits who have labored 
so much and honestly for the weal of humanity, must glow 
with a profound delight in beholding us steer clear to-day 
of those shoals upon which so many of their own benignant 
and beautiful hopes have been wrecked." 

I believe, for my part, these great souls, in their unknown 
abode, are better employed than in the enjoyment of behold- 
ing France so honorably governed by M. Guizot and his 
troop. But the oratorical movement was beautiful. 

M. Guizot was not less eloquent, when in the Coalition 
he battled with impetuous energy against the murmurs, the 



G u I z o T . 269 

clamors and stampings of the two Centres. In proportion 
as the storm rose in its rage, he stood the firmer, he clung 
to the tribune ; momently he grew paler and paler with an- 
ger. Flis eye shot the flashes and the bolts of the thunder, 
and environed by enemies, he attacked them like a huge 
eagle, tearing off their flesh and plucking out their eyes. 

And recently, in the debate upon Foreign AflTairs, he has 
sustained on that boisterous sea, with an eloquence that rose 
with the emergency, the onset of the furious and congre- 
gated lances of the Opposition. We have never observed 
his elocution clearer, his attitude more firm, his gesture more 
noble, and his language more assured and decisive. 

M. Guizot passes in the Opposition for being of a cruel 
disposition. His flaming eyes, his pallid aspect, his shrivelled 
lips, give him the appearance of an inquisitor. He is said 
to be the author of the famous saying : " Show no mercy ;" 
a frightful phrase, if it had indeed been uttered ! 

But such is not the fact. M. Guizot gives me rather the 
impression of a sectary than a terrorist. He has more 
audacity of head than resoluteness of heart and hand. The 
profound esteem, the imperturbable self-complacency, the 
high admiration which he entertains for himself, occupy so 
fully his whole soul as to leave no place in it for any other 
sentiments. He would plunge head-foremost into the ocean, 
denying the w^hile that he was drowning himself, and he be- 
lieves in his own infallibility with a violent and desperate 
faith. 

He resembles those angels of pride who braved the wrath 
of the living God, and who, with wings reversed, were hurled 
into the depths of the abyss. 

Wherefore should I not mention, in my solicitude to be 
sincere, that M. Guizot, in his private relations, is a man of 
strict and pure morals, and that he deserves, by the lofty 
integrity of his life and his sentiments, the distinguished 
esteem of the virtuous ? I have witnessed his paternal grief, 
and I have admired the sqijenity of his stoicism. There is 
certainly great firmness in that soul. 

23* 



270 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

I do not write here as a party man, to flatter the passions 
of my friends, but as a man of truth and sobriety, to pre- 
pare the judgment of posterity. Let the contemporaries of 
M. Guizot, who would roll him anew in the mire of the past 
and who reproach him with his early absolutism, descend 
themselves within their consciences and tell us what their 
opinions on the subject of government were twenty-six years 
ago ! Made with entire truth, this would be a curious con- 
fession. Such an one to-day a red-hot radical or a repub- 
lican would be found swimming along with the broad cur- 
rent of despotism, at a time when M. Guizot was meditating, 
professing, aye and practising liberty. He had been an in- 
structor in it to all of us, because he understood it much 
more thoroughly. 

Moreover, M. Guizot is a man himself to render homage 
to the sincerity of an adversary. But imbued with the an- 
tiquated doctrines of the English oligarchy, he imagines 
his form to be the beau-ideal of government, and persuades 
himself that it is much more favorable to progress than the 
most advanced democracies. We wish him joy of his no- 
tion. 

The true government for him, is the aristocratic form, the 
aristocracy of the nobility, which he would like well enough 
liad he been born a noble, the aristocracy of the burgess 
class which he desires, because he belongs to this class. 

M. Guizot has a sort of dictatorial stateliness which al- 
ways imposes both upon his own party and upon his adver- 
saries. Legislative bodies, and especially governing ma- 
jorities who need, when they have none of their own, that a 
will be formed for them, are much taken with men of de- 
liberation ; they love to be led, and feel themselves dis- 
charged in this way of the trouble of conducting themselves. 
M. Guizot has that peremptory air of disdain which does 
not make him amiable to the majority of the Chamber, but 
which renders him necessary. Seizing the critical moment, 
he states succinctly the question and challenges his op- 
ponents to the contest. This manoeuvre, which throws the 



GUIZOT. 271 

Opposition into the falsest of positions, the position of de- 
fence, has always succeeded since he has been minister ; 
and he has had the good fortune, it must be said, of encoun- 
tering, at the head of the Opposition or the Third-party, 
men of talent undoubtedly, but rather deficient in energy, 
in determination, who, by eluding the question of yes or no, 
left him nearly all the advantage of the offensive. 

We are not to think, however, that M. Guizot is destitute 
of dexterity ; that stubborn nature relaxes and becomes 
quite pliant upon occasion. He has kept his place at the 
head of his party, less by his superior knowledge than his 
adroitness at flattering two villainous infirmities, fear and 
pride. Whenever he saw his philosophic generalities fail 
to stimulate, he frightened the Centres with the dangers to 
their person and especially to their property, a thing which 
they prize above all else ; and then when their terror was 
wrought up gradually to a bodily tremor, he would tell them 
bravely that they had saved the kingdom by trampling un- 
der their feet the hideous monster of anarchy, that they had 
won the esteem of every man of principle and virtue, 
throughout entire Europe, and that they fell short very 
little, if indeed anything, of being all, all of them, heroes — 
which is a very agreeable thing to hear said of one's self. 

Some have pretended that M. Guizot had a species of po- 
litical courage ; whether it proceed from the lungs or from 
the larynx, like the voice of certain singers, he has, it is 
said, this courage. How can I know, and how should I 
say ? I have never seen him put to the test, either* in the 
tribune or through the press. 

In fact, he assumes in our pacific Chambers the attitude 
of a suppressor of Insurrections, he and his party. M. 
Guizot is not ignorant, however, that in those victories, the 
odds have never been less than a hundred to one, and that, 
moreover, neither he, nor one individual of his parliamen- 
tary grenadiers, has burned a single priming. But he hopes 
his co-victors may have bad memories. He knows perfectly 
what sort of people he is addressing. He knows that by 



272 ^EVOLTTTION OF JULY. 

telling men of obscure origin that were there to be a new 
revolution, they would be persecuted, and by thus assigning 
them the importance of victims, he at once flatters and 
frightens them, and that in this way he places them under 
his protecting wing — and this, it must be owned, is cleverly 
contrived. 

But much as he may desire to enhance himself in the 
eyes of the majority, I am unwilling that he should vaunt 
so loudly of the perils which he has personally incurred, 
and the violence which he has undergone for its sake. The 
electoral enfeoffment of his college, one hundred thousand 
francs annual salary, with lodging, fuelling and lighting 
free, the grand-cross of the Legion of honor, three chairs at 
the Institute, the places of minister of the Interior and For- 
eign Affairs, the presidency of the University and the em- 
bassy to London, such within eleven years, are the horrible 
violences which M. Guizot has submitted to and the dangers 
he has braved — and not a single pin-scratch ! 

Grave in his public deportment, pertinacious of his ob- 
ject rather than his means, ambitious by system and tem- 
perament, laborious and peremptory, M. Guizot possesses 
all the qualities and all the defects of a Doctrinarian leader. 

Victorious and a minister, M. Guizot does not retire to the 
voluptuous pleasures of Capua. He pursues you in your 
flight, sets his foot upon your head, and crushes you irre- 
coverably. Vanquished, and by the Opposition, he supplies 
the deficiency of his numbers by the dexterity of his tac- 
tics. He calculates his forces, counts the days of battle. 
He keeps a watchful eye upon his band, and harangues 
them by voice and gesture, gives the word and takes his own 
position on the confines of the field, to stop the deserters and 
rally the wavering. His squadron moves in solid column 
under this skilful and resolute chieftan. It is not numerous, 
but it is composed rather of officers than soldiers : a troop 
golden-armed, veteran, independent, presumptuous, furious 
upon occasion, supple in its evolutions and who are ready 
to work at sapping and mihing, night and day, until they 



a u r z o T . 273 

deem the time come to erect the scaling-ladders and mount 
the breach. M. Guizot's troopers must, every one, keep 
constantly the knapsack on his back, and the capsule on the 
battery, ready to fire, while he himself, posted upon an ele- 
vation, and his spy-glass directed in the fashion of an em- 
peror, indicates the positions which are to be seized. 

But what is all this, if it is not war ? Accordingly may it 
be truly said, that during the eleven years that he has been 
in public life, M. Guizot has been conducting not a govern- 
ment but a campaign. He has encamped power in a for- 
tress bastioned, serrated, pierced with port-holes, provided 
with trusty gendannes to keep sentinel on the ramparts, and 
unerring cannons, to fire, at any moment, upon any passer-by. 

He has been wasting a powerful intellect, extraordinary 
faculties, a consummate experience, an unflinching heart in 
the service of a principle so false that hg would himself per- 
mit me to say it is false, but would not permit me to prove, 
it so. 

The continued humiliation of France, the timidity and 
baseness of our diplomacy, the prostitution of the press, the 
violence of our riots, the blood shed upon the scaffolds, the 
anarchy of opinions, the enormity of our standing army, the 
excess of taxation, the disorder of the finances, the animos- 
ity of parties — all this does not proceed from M. Guizot, but 
from his principle. True to France, he might have led her 
by a silken thread. False to her, he holds her chained down 
by a hundred iron cables, which she will one day burst from 
around her. 

With all that is necessary besides, for the government of 
a state, M. Guizot lacks sensibility and genius, and he would 
be fitter to dii'ect the senate of a Protestant republic, than to 
lead the great kingdom of France. 

I am not clear whether it would be better for any ruling 
cabinet to have M. Guizot's friendship than his hostility ; for 
his alliances cost more dearly than his hatreds. If he con- 
sents to tow at his chariot- w^heels a minister who falls into a 
swoon, the latter must suffer himself to be manacled, and 



274 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

must follow him, his heart swollen with shame and sobs, in 
the manner of the kings vanquished by the Romans. He 
drags him behind by his torn toga, and after having covered 
him with insulting mockery, he will deign perhaps to leave 
him his crown and his life. But what a life, and what a 



crown 



M. Guizot M' ould be but the chief of a handful of secta- 
ries, had he planted his batteries only in the halls of the 
parliament. But he has had the skill to erect citadels with- 
out, detached forts, from which he sweeps down the scat- 
tered and disordered troops of the adversary. 

He has sagaciously perceived, that in a form of govern- 
ment where it is ideas, not a man or men, that rule, the first 
step to take was to monopolize and secure the manufacturers 
of ideas. The ministerial journals, even whdn he is not 
minister, are full of the creatures of M. Guizot, who, every 
morning, chant his praises and do his work. So completely 
has he taken possession of all the avenues to the academy, 
that there is now no obtaining a place there without his will 
and pleasure. Three-fourths of the sub-prefects, of the 
prefects and of the procurator-generals, are Doctrinarians 
prom.pted by him, and who merely repeat his lessons. All 
the pedants in us and in i of Germanic and Scythian Eu- 
rope, fall in prostrate ecstasy before the incomprehensible 
profundity of his genius, and the ambassadors of the Holy 
Alliance, whose purposes he so well subserves, recommend 
him in their secret notes. He has repeopled the Council of 
State, he has recruited the Chamber of Peers, he has senti- 
nelled the wardrobe, the anti-chambers, and perhaps the 
kitchens of the Palace, with Doctrinarians of all sorts of 
sex, in petticoats, in linen caps, and in epaulets. 

Minister or not, M. Guizot reigns in the under apartments 
of the Court, as well as in his lecture-hall. The Court is 
Doctrinarian, doctrinarian with a very limited intelligence, 
I know well, with a prolixity of weak and intemperate 
phraseology, and some poverty — not of gold assuredly, but 
of idea. 



G u I z o T . 275 

Accordingly, am I far from saying that M. Guizot is not 
greatly superior to the Court in understanding, in character 
and in speech. But though the Pere Lachese was more 
learned than Lewis XIV., Lewis XIV. was not for this the 
less a Jesuit : so from the fact that the Court is not a match for 
M. Guizot, it does not follow that the Court is any the less 
a good and frank Doctrinarian, who glories in the creed, and 
has willed with its master in pedagogism, the electoral mo- 
nopoly, a hereditary peerage, the intimidations of Septem- 
ber, the Disjunction law, large budgets, dower ies, dotations, 
bastiles, the armed peace and other inventions and discove- 
ries legislative and governmental, of the same character 
and tendency. So that it may be said that the Court and 
M. Guizot, M. Guizot and the Court govern France in part- 
nership, and here is the eleventh year, as we see, that she 
is so governed. M.M. Casimir-Perier, Mortier, Bro^ie., 
Mole, Soult and Thiers have been first ministers of the sys- 
tem, but they were not the system. Legitimists, Third- 
partyists, Dynasties, Anti-dynasties, vainly will they all of 
them together in that Chamber, bustle and busy themselves ; 
the Doctrinarians will prevail with or without office, unless 
the Court change, or it should be M. Guizot. 

It is not with the Court that I have here to do: but M.^ 
Guizot (to confine myself to him) how can he have brought 
himself to lend his fine intellect to such vile purposes ? 
How is it that he, an honorable man, has not felt ill at ease 
these ten years back, amid that servile and depraved multi- 
tude ? He, who has seen intimately the recesses of so 
many false hearts, of so many profligate consciences, of so 
many venal or vain-glorious corruptions, how does he not 
blush to the eyelids, for the villainou^ traffic he is driving ? 
He a Calvinist, he persecuted in his ancestors for the free- 
dom of religious discussion, he born and brought up in the 
full liberty of political discussion, how can he have inter- 
dicted to so many manipulators of Charters, of oaths and of 
kings, the right of examination ? How could he, an advo- 
cate for abolishing capital punishment, have proposed to 



27G REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

condemn political writers to the punishment, a thousand 
times more cruel of transportation to the uninhabitable wilds 
of a distant island, and beneath a tropical sun ? How can 
he, who is a man of art as well as of intellect, have come 
to place the material concerns of society, so brutal and 
stupefying, above its moral interests, above the sacred love 
of country and liberty, above all those noble aspirations 
which are the life, the charm and the true greatness of 
civilized nations ? God has permitted that he should be the 
author of so much evil in punishment of his pride. 

M. Guizot has so indoctrinated the " country gentlemen" 
in his selfish, perverse, impious, anti-christian maxims ; 
he has so repeatedly assured them, that they were the 
sovereigns of science, of eloquence and of thought ; that 
they were the absolute masters of the soil and the indus- 
trial interests ; that all appertained to them by right of 
social supremacy, and that the rest of the nation were but 
a horde of helots and barbarians, — that the " country-gen- 
tlemen" have been observed to conduct themselves accor- 
dingly ; have plunged into all the beastly and carnal sen- 
sualities of materialism ; have distributed amongst them- 
selves all the offices in the National, in the Departmental 
Councils, in the magistracy, in the army, in the legislative 
bodies, in the several departments of administration ; have 
supported with acclamation the laws respecting electoral 
monopolies, the jury, the enlistment, civil lists the most 
monstrous, doweries, dotations, corn-laws, abuses of dukes 
and princes, and in short the squanderings of the public 
money by town and Court, and have attached and tied down 
the nation all alive to a sort of feudal vassalage, more un- 
endurable perhaps than the serfdom of the middle ages. 

M. Guizot, instead of following the age in its undulations, 
in its successive transformations, and in its career of pro- 
gress, has determined to construct a sort of fiction, — half 
English, half Doctrinarian, — which should move with 
mechanical uniformity, and which will pass away without 
leaving a trace of it behind, for it is a work asjainst nature. 



G u I z o T . 277 

But at length, the nation, that nation of thirty-four mill- 
ions of freemen, will demand what all this means, and will 
compel its thoughtless and wasteful stewards to render 
their accounts. Then will be heard some terrible cracking 
of that edifice built upon sand and buffeted on every side 
by the furious tempest; and the strife will be who, in this 
universal quaking of the earth, will decamp the speediest ; 
and M. Guizot, tliis pretended conservatist, will perhaps be 
the first to raise the cry of sauve qui pent. 

M. Guizot would be but half portrayed unless he was 
compared with M. Thiers ; I shall therefore close with their 
parallel. 

M. Guizot and M. Thiers are the two most eminent men 
that the boiling cauldron of July has thrown to the surface 
of political affairs. 

Born both of them of the press, they have strangled their 
mother, on leaving their cradle, after sucking her breast- 
milk to the blood. 

Both, like inquisitors, have kindled the flames of the Sep- 
tember fire, around those who exercised the privilege of 
free thought, saying to them .-—Believe or burn ! 
^ Both represent in the government, the one the constitu- 
tional burgess class of legitimacy, the other the dynastic 
burgess class of the actual revolution. 

Both are not bigoted to the person of the king, and royal- 
ists unconditionally. They are no more for the younger 
branch than for the elder, or any other. They are ac 
tuated but by ambition of fortune or by attachment to a 
system, and would readily treat Louis Philippe, be as- 
sured, the occasion offering, after the fashion in which they 
treated Charles X. 

Unfortunately these ten years, unskilful and timid helms- 
men, they have done but turn their little bark, in their little 
archipelago, around the same shoals. They lurk in the 
creeks. They do not venture into the open sea. 

France, in spite of the obstacles from monopoly and tax- 
ation, has moved of herself along in a flourishing career of 

24 ' ■ 



278 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

agriculture and industry, and they imagine this to be the 
effect of their policy. France counterpoised Europe with 
the influence of one hundred millions of revenue and thirty- 
four millions of men, and they imagine that they, Thiers or 
Guizot, by putting their little finger in the scale, may in- 
cline the balance. 

Parliamentary government may be distinguished into the 
bastard and the legitimate. The bastard springs from the 
copulation of monopoly and corruption. The legitimate is 
born of the marriage of nationality and law. May it please 
Messrs. Guizot and Thiers to tell us whether they are bas- 
tards or lawfully-begotten — in the order, of course I mean, 
of political filiation ? 

For the rest, Thiers and Guizot are almost complete op- 
posites to each other, in character, in opinion and in talent : 
the one pliant, talkative, familiar, cunning and coaxing ; 
the other imperious, austere and pompous. The one, whom 
the old reminiscences of youth are constantly drawing in 
their wake towards the Left ; the other, whom the sudden 
impulses of legitimism bear about towards the Right. 

M. Guizot, by dint of learning and gravity, may, among 
the nobles of diplomacy, pass for an aristocrat. M. Thiers, 
in spite of the confidence and extraordinary brilliance of his 
mind, will never rise, in their eyes, above the rank of a 
parvenue. 

The ambassadors of the Holy Alliance will see in M. 
Guizot the conservatist, a semblance of the legitimist. In 
M. Thiers they will always see but the revolutionist, even 
when he would sweeten his voice, lower his tone, and sheathe 
his talons. The aristocracies are sisters like the democ- 
racies. Confidences would be committed to M. Mole and 
M. de Broglie which would not be vouchsafed to M. Thiers. 
It would be otherwise under a government truly national, 
which derives its efficacy from principles not men. The 
thing is not without grounds in an exceptional government, 
whose force proceeds neither from the people nor from itself. 



G u I z o T . 279 

M. Guizot is cautious in action, M. Thiers bold in 
speech. 

M. Guizot looks softly, and M. Thiers fiercely at the 
powers of Europe, who laugh at both the one and the other. 

M. Guizot places France upon an easy couch, for fear of 
rupturing an aneurism. M. Thiers would hurl her through 
the immensity of space like a hairy comet. 

From the moment M. Guizot gets into power, you are 
sure that the press, great and small, will be tracked like a 
wild beast, into all its dens. If M. Thiers be raised to 
power, you are sure it will break into a universal mutter- 
ing of war. They are both in our domestic and our foreign 
affairs, our two good angels, the guardian angels of peace 
and of liberty ! 

M. Thiers would sway the press rather by seduction, M. 
Guizot, rather by terror. After all, what is the liberty of 
the press, such as Guizot and Thiers have made it? A 
liberty of the press which is not allowed to discuss the prin- 
ciple of the government ! Is not this in truth a ludicrous 
liberty ? A potter, who is not allowed to perforate with his 
finger the pitcher for which he has just tempered the clay I 
What sort of potter can such an one, be? What sort of 
pitcher ? 

M. Guizot the eclectic, and M. Thiers the fatalist, will 
not condemn to fire everlasting a person who should discuss 
the attributes or the existence of God. But they will con- 
demn to the punishment of Salazie the man who would dare 
to discuss the king. It is that God, the great God of earth 
and heaven, in their opinion, does not exist. But does the 
king exist ? These gentlemen, the better to assure them- 
selves of it, put a hand upon their red portfolio and exclaim : 
The king does exist ! 

M. Guizot disserts by maxims, M. Thiers by sallies. 

Guizot, in soaring into the gloomy regions of philosophical 
abstraction, encounters some vivid gleams of light. Thiers 
is better pleased not to elevate himself as far as the clouds, 



280 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

^than to lose himself in their misf. He is rather gifted with 
legs than with wings. 

M. Guizot does not throw upon the parliamentary table 
too many motions at a time. M. Thiers, on the contrary, 
empties his dice-box ; he plays at hazard, and risks his all. 

M. Thiers is more favorable to the popular sovereignty ; 
M. Guizot to the parliamentary. The starting point of the 
one is the Revolution (English) of 1688, that of the other, 
the Revolution of 1793. The one is more of a philan- 
thropist, the other more of a patriot. 

M. Guizot has more faith in ideas, M. Thiers, in the 
edge of the sword ; M. Guizot in the resistant inertness of 
the middle class, M. Thiers in the insurrectionary activity 
of the masses. 

M. Guizot puts up for chief of the conservatives — con- 
servatives of what ? M. Thiers for leader of the progressists ; 
a new term, if not a new thinsf. 

M. Guizot is constantly flattering the majority ; he broods 
upon them with his dark eye, lest they should disband, and 
takes all occasions to vaunt the unswerving constancy, the 
firm union and the heroic courage of the aforesaid majority, 
although he knows in his heart what estimate to set upon 
these three matters, quite as well as you or I. M. Thiers, 
if the majority show impatience or disorder, would rather 
compel it by an application of the lash, and as he prefers the 
quality to the quantity, he casts his most caressing looks 
towards the extremities of the Chamber. 

M. Guizot and M. Thiers do not treat their respective 
majorities in the same manner and with the same air. May 
I say that the one is more insolent to it, the other more im- 
pertinent ? 

M. Guizot and M. Thiers have still two other modes of 
treating their majority, which are worth knowing. The one 
sounds the tocsin, beats the drum, and tolls the generate. 
The other pricks the excitable fibre of self-interest. It is 
with the support of his salaried deputies that M. Guizot ekes 
out thQ number one-half more one, and, revolting to his 



G U I Z O T. -281 

philosophic pride though it may be, the most transcendent 
of his arguments will always be, with this majority, the 
argument of making-the-pot-boil. 

M. Guizot is too presumptuous not to despise insult, and 
M. Thiers too thoughtless to bear it long in memory. 

Out of place, M. Guizot avails himself of the parliamen- 
tary authority to compel the influence of individuals to his 
purpose ; in place, he avails himself of individual influence 
to harass and reduce the parliamentary power. Out of 
place or member of the Opposition, M. Thiers plants his 
batteries against the minister on the ground of internal 
abuses, and annoys him with the small warfare of tripping 
him up (crocs-en-jamhe ;) in place, and minister, he transfers 
the debate into the field of Foreign Relations, because he is 
there at liberty to act at large and almost without control, 
and of being as reserved as he pleases. 

M. Guizot overcomes objections by his pertinacity ; M. 
Thiers eludes them by his suppleness. He slips through 
your fingers like a slimy eel ; you must take him with the 
teeth to hold him. 

M. Guizot affirms or denies ; M. Thiers says neither yes 
nor no. 

M. Guizot, urged, interrogated, goaded, wraps himself in 
the disdain of a dry and arrogant denial, or in the haughti- 
ness of his silence ; M. Thiers defends too tediously, like a 
lawyer, the minutest details of his ancient ministries, and as 
other orators try to imitate him, without having his intellect, 
the legislative debates are apt to degenerate into driv- 
elling. 

The one, more a spiritualist, addicts himself rather to the 
principle. The other, more a materialist, is attached rather 
to the facts. The one believes in a sort of morality, the 
other believes very little in anything. 

M. Guizot has boldness in a conflict with persons, then 
he is courageous through pride. But when he has to do 
only with affairs, then his pride is worth him nothing. And 
this explains why he shows so much resoluteness, in the tri- 

24* 



282 ' REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

bune, against parliamentary minorities, and so little in the 
cabinet against the insolencies of a foreign power. 

M. Thiers has reason to desire a large army and a stout 
budiret, because he has made himself the advocate of mo- 
nopoly, and that a government of monopoly cannot dispense 
with these expedients. If he had been content to remain a 
national man, he might have been able to do with half an 
army and half a budget ; we would thus be better off and 
he too. This we say, and, be assured of it, this he thinks. 

M. Guizot, minister or not, lives but in the atmosphere 
of politics. He has the force, the resolution, the obstinacy, 
the experience of a man who thinks, every moment of the 
day, but upon the same thing. With him, power is a matter 
of temperament almost as much a of ambition. 

M. Thiers does not live exclusively for government and pol- 
itics. Is he displaced from the ministry, he turns artist, puts on 
steam, is off to Naples, digs for mummies and wrhes histories. 

M. Guizot's intellect has more generality ; M. Thiers's 
more breadth and activity. 

M. Thiers, like phosphor, blazes and goes out. M. Gui- 
zot, like a tomb-lamp, sheds only a sombre light, but burns 
forever. 

M. Guizot sometimes takes obscurity for profundity, and 
big words for great things. M. Thiers, sometimes also takes 
tinsel for gold, and bluster for glory. 

M. Guizot is always a philosopher, M. Thiers is always 
an artist. The one seems to imagine himself always lec- 
turing in his chair, the other to think himself conversing in 
a drawing-room. 

Both are perhaps the first journalists of their times. But 
M. Guizot cultivates rather the dogmatism of the press, 
Thiers rather its running polemics. The one delights to 
listen to the sound of his hollow theories. The other groups 
the facts and occurrences of each day, around his system. 
He insinuates himself by some imperceptible inlets into the 
outworks of the Opposition, and while they are asleep, he 
fires the cannons. 



G u I z o T . 283 

As a political writer, M. Guizot is better liked in foreign 
countries than with us, where the graces of form are pre- 
ferred to the solidity of the matter, and where the style 
makes the whole man. For the rest, it must be allowed 
that the laborious commentators of this publicist, spend a 
vast deal of effort to divine his meaning. They succeed 
in penetrating him nearly as well as we do the Apocalypse. 
Genius, however, is light ; that which is not clear is not 
French. 

M. Thiers, and this will not displease him, is, in his 
histories, rather the statesman than the writer. He excels 
neither in the plan, nor the arrangment, nor the coloring, 
nor the profundity, nor the concision. But he is singularly 
remarkable for his high intelligence of events, the ability 
of his narrative and the perfect lucidity of his style. He 
writes much as he speaks, with a picturesque abundance 
and charm. 

No French wj-iter has equalled him in the description of 
battles, or the exposition of financial crises. He has related, 
in the history the most popular and widely-read of our 
day, the great wars of the Revolution, its Assemblies, its 
constitutions, its negotiations and its laws. It is for him 
now to present us Napoleon upon the scene of the Consulate 
and the Empire, in the garb he is to wear to posterity. 

M. Thiers, however, belongs to the fatalist school, to that 
barren school which excuses the faults and the crimes even 
of governments by the plea of necessity, which recognizes 
no rule of right either in the nation or between nations, 
which stifles free will and plunges virtue into despair. Of 
what consequence to us would be the history of past facts, 
without the moral significance of these facts for the instruc- 
tion of the present and future generations ? 

M. Guizot has more method in his improvisations and his 
discourses ; M, Thiers more freedom and natural ease. 
M. Guizot is the more eloquent in anger ; M. Thiers in 
enthusiasm. 

Nothing can be more grave than the diction of M. Guizot ; 



284 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

nothing more charming than the sprightly fluency of M. 
Thiers. At the end of a quarter-hour's speaking, M. Gui- 
zot fatigues me ; at the end of two hours, M. Thiers inter- 
ests me. You feel no solicitude for M. Guizot, because he 
has his theme prepared, and you know he will not wander 
from it a liair's-breadth. You feel none for M. Thiers, 
because you know he will come off happily from the ex- 
cursions the most distant, and the passes the most difficult. 

If the peril of the situation be imminent, M. Guizot will 
pull the selfish fibres of the burgess deputy. In such a 
case, M. Thiers will sound his trumpet and you will see 
him appear at the extremity of the defile, a tri-colored flag 
in his hand. It is Bonaparte on the bridge of Areola. 

Both, to recapitulate, will have been found unequal to the 
task they have assumed, because they have been unequal 
even to their own principles, which are not principles. 
Both, under the official gilding of a Court costume, have 
but too often forgotten even the sentiment of their own 
dignity. Both, a pitiful spectacle ! tear one another, like 
two dogs, for the bones of power, and after this edifying 
combat, the victor comes humbly to lick the feet of his 
master. 

Men of petty warfare and of petty peace, they have 
failed even to bring to an end either the Bedouin skirmish- 
ing of Algeria, or the abortion of their parliamentary sove- 
reignty. 

Will they say, they who were, by their intrepid coalition, 
to drive back into the palace kitchens the encroachments of 
despotic government, will they say with the great Chatham : 
" I have been called to the ministry by the voice of the 
people, and it is to the people alone that I owe an account 
of my actions ?" 

Will they say — they, responsible ministers, who had 
sworn to wear worthily the sceptre of the 7th of August — 
will they say with Napoleon, after the battle of Austerlitz : 
" Frenchmen ! when you set upon my head the imperial 
crown, I made oath to maintain it untarnished in that proud 



G u I z o T . 285 

effulgence of glory which alone could give it value in my 
eyes." Alas ! alas ! France, that noble France, astonished 
to-day to find herself desolate, surveys herself, seeks herself, 
interrogates herself, and can no more comprehend herself 
what she is, or recognize herself what she has been ! 

Incapable of making her a queen, they have made her a 
huckstress, and after the day's work, retired within the re- 
cess of her shop — she who was wont to wield the sabre and 
the sword — there she sits, occupied in counting her re- 
ceipts and piling up her coppers in portable packages ! 



286 • REVOLUTION OP JULY. 



I LIBRAE- I 
%3S.Whiers. 

M. Thiers has not been dandled, in his infancy, on the 
lap of a duchess. Born poor, he lacked a fortune ; born 
obscure, he was without a name. Having failed at the bar, 
he turned literateur and went body and soul into the liberal 
party, rather from necessity than conviction. There he 
betook him to admiring Danton and the leaders of the 
" Mountain," and carried to extravagance the calculating 
enthusiasm of his hyperboles. Devoured by a thousand 
wants, like all persons of vivid imagination, he owed the 
beginning of his competency to M. Lafitte, and his reputa- 
tion to his own talents. Meanwhile, were it not for the Rev- 
olution of 1830, M. Thiers would be perhaps to-day neither 
elector, nor eligible, nor deputy, nor minister, nor so much 
as Academician : he might have grown gray in the literary 
esteem of a coterie. 

Since, M. Thiers has changed his part : he has become 
author — champion and panegyrist of dynasties — supporter 
of privileges — issuer andexecutor of oppressive ordinances; 
he has irreparably attached his name to the besiegement of 
Paris, to the bombardment of Lyons, to the magnificent ex- 
ploits of Transnotran street, to the transportations of Mount 
St. Michael, and the imprisonments, to the laws against as- 
sociations, public hawkers, courts of assize, and the jour- 
nals : to all in short which has chained down liberty, to all 
which has stigmatized the Press, to all which has perverted 
the trial by Jury, to all which has decimated the patriots, 
to all which has demoralized the nation, to all which has 
trampled in the dust the pure and generous Revolution of 
July. 




VNL.- 



M. THIERS. 287 

His friends — Dupont de I'Eure, Carrel, Lafitte — he has 
deserted ; his liberal principles he has repudiated ; he began 
by serving the dynasty as tool of all work, one of those in- 
struments which bow but never break, which will bend to 
the contact of both ends, and fly back — so supple are they I 
— with the resilience of an arrow. 

Doubtles your aristocratical ministers are more courteous 
in speech ; but they are more obstinate in character. They 
are more expert at bowing with grace the head and spine. 
They will fitoop to the earth to take up their master's hat, 
but they will resume their upright posture with a haughty 
brow.. Their intercourse with kings is that of one gentleman 
with another. They look upon the place of minister as be- 
neath them. Accordingly, by instinct of domination, kings 
prefer to take their ministers from among the lower classes 
than from the nobility. They know the latter will serve 
them but in quality of servants, while the former almost al- 
ways may be employed as domestics. 

If then it happens that, in a monarchy, a man of low 
birth, but of some talent, has received an education more 
literary than moral, and that, borne on the arm of fortune, 
he has crept to the summit of power, his elevation will 
speedily turn his head. As he finds himself isolated upon 
the heights he has gained, and knows not where to lean for 
support — having neither personal nor family consideration, 
being no longer, nor wishing to be, one of the people, and 
unable, whatever he may wish or do, to be one of the no- 
bility — he will place himself at the feet of his king, will 
clasp them, will lick them, will be at a loss to know by what 
contorsions of servility, by what caresses of supplication, 
by what simulations of devotedness, by what genuflexions, 
■by what kiss-foot cringings to manifest the abjectness of his 
humility and the prostration of his worship. The person- 
ages of this description are like the predestined of Ghehenna 
who make a compact with the devil. They are marked 
with his nail, and if they but turn aside the head, burst a 
link of their chain, make a single step, the infernal owner 



288 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

to whom their body has been delivered and their soul has 
been sold, cries out to them : " Stir not, thou art mine !" 

Run on, my pencil ; I have here no need of either nicely 
spread canvass or of compass, run on at thy own fantasy ! 
I have to paint M. Thiers just as he speaks — less well, no 
doubt, than he speaks ; I wish to sit to the public as M. 
Thiers sits to me, by commencing with the chin, ending 
with the eyes 3 and, that the portrait may be the more 
faithful, to pass off from the subject, cross and re-cross in 
a thousand curvatures of digression, then return, lose my 
way, recover it, lose it again, and make M. Thiers exactly 
after his own image. 

M. Thiers, taken in detail, has a large and intelligent 
forehead, lively eyes, a smile delicate and intellectual. But 
in his general aspect, he is chubby, negligent, vulgar. He 
has in his prattle something of the merchant, in his gait 
something of the apprentice. His nasal voice rends the ear. 
The front of the tribune reaches to his shoulder and hides 
him almost from the auditory. It must be added that no 
one puts any confidence in him, not even he himself — espe 
cially himself! Physical disadvantages, distrust on the part 
alike of enemies and friends, he has everything against him ; 
and yet as soon as this little man gets possession of the tri- 
bune, he ensconces himself in it so at ease, he has such a 
flow of intelligence, such a flow of mind, that you allow 
yourself to be carried away by the pleasure of hearing 
him. 

He droops, from habit, his head upon the chin, while 
going to the tribune ; but once mounted and speaking, he 
erects it so well and lifts himself so jauntily a-tiptoe, that he 
out-tops the whole assembly. 

Although he begins almost every paragraph of his speeches 
with this formula : Permit me, Gentlemen, or ; / ask your 
pardon, he very freely dispenses with the permission and 
thinks himself far above the pardon of any man. But there 
is so much vanity in a French Chamber ! You must ap- 
pear so humble in addressing it ! With this little precau- 



M . THIERS. 289 

tion, you may venture, and say, what you please. It is the 
passport of many an impertinence. 

M. Thiers cannot be said to proceed by fitful sallies like 
Dupin, nor to have the impressive delivery of OJil on- 
Barrot, nor the scoffing sarcasm of Mauguin, nor the billowy 
eloquence of Sauzet, nor the superior reasoning power of 
Guizot : his talent is of a peculiar sort, and resembles, 
neither nearly nor remotely, that of any other person. 

His speaking, I grant you, is not oration, it is chat, but 
chat at once vivid, brilliant, airy, voluble, lively, studded 
with snatches of history, with anecdotes, and keen reflec- 
tions ; and all this loquacity unwinds its endless thread, 
now cut, now broken, then tied, then loosed, again knotted, 
with an incomparable dexterity of language. The thought 
springs so quickly in that head, so instantaneously, that you 
would imagine it uttered before it had been conceived. The 
vast lungs of a giant would be insufficient to expectorate 
the flood of words of this gifted pigmy. Nature, ever 
attentive and compassionate in her compensations, seems in 
him to have concentrated all the might of manhood in the 
fragile organs of the larynx. 

His allusions fly and flap like the bat's wing, and pierce 
you so quickly that one feels wounded without knowing 
whence proceeded the dart. You would find in his dis- 
courses* a thousand contradictions to criticise, but he leav'es 
you neither place nor time for it. He envelopes you in 
the labyrinth of his argumentations where a thousand routs 
intersect each other in all directions, and of which he alone 
holds the clue. He takes a view entirely overlooked of 
the question, which seemed exhausted, and presents it in a 
new light by the most ingenious reasonings. He is never ' 
found unprepared upon any subject : as prolific, as prompt 
in defence as in attack, in reply as in exposition. I know 
not if his reply be always the most solid, but it is always 
the most specious. He stops sometimes suddenly to retort 
upon the interrupters, and pops off his repartee with an 
4idroitness of aim which completely stuns them. 



i2i>0 R E V ( ) L u T I o N or j u l y . 

If a theory have several aspects, some false, some true, 
he groups them, he- mixes them, he makes them play and 
radiate before you with a hand so invisibly agile that you 
jiave not time to seize the sophism on its passage. I do not 
know whether the disorder of his improvisations, the incohe- 
rent huddling of such a mass of heterogeneous propositions, 
the odd jumble of all those ideas and all those tones, bo 
design and the effect of his art ; but he is of all orators the 
most easily refuted when you read him, the most difficult 
to refute when you only listen. He is certainly the most 
amusing of our political profligates, the sharpest of our 
sophists, the subtlest and most undetectable of our thimble- 
riggers. He is the Bosco of the tribune. 

He is ever praying and beseeching that he be allowed to 
speak the truth. Ah ! my God ! do not talk so much about 
your intention to speak it, but speak it. 

He is rash and timid by turns. He now precipitates 
himself into action, and then flinches and retires — in the 
consciousness of his power if you take his own word for 
it. He sees all the points of the difficulty, but does not 
solve one of them. He takes a globe between his hands — 
the ballot-urn would answer his purpose as well — and de- 
. livers a course of geography. He depresses the circles, 
the equator, the solstices. He elevates the coasts, sounds 
tiie gulfs, nears and signalizes the promontories, th» shoals, 
the ports, the cities, the mountains, the mouths of rivers. 
He makes the circuit of the world, and returns home, after 
having seen much, talked much, travelled much, but walked 
little, given much lecture but little instruction. 

Were he to be offered the command of an army he would 
, not refuse it ; and for my part, I am by no means sure, on 
the faith of Timon, that Tie would not gain the battle. I 
vow to you I have heard with my own ears generals so 
taken with him as to declare they would willingly serve 
under his command. 

You smile, but no, I speak quite seriously ; and were he 
onlv four inches taller and had learned the sudden charge, 



M. THIERS. 291 

he might have been " little corporal" and a bit of a Napo- 
leon. 

Wake him not, I pray you, from his illusion, when in 
the tribune he lays his plans, manoeuvers his troops, and 
expatiates in his* strategetical evolutions. For then he 
imagines himself really and truly general, not alone of a 
single army, but generalissimo, and in case of need an 
admiral ; and admiral, too, so accomplished, that in order to 
sail from Greece into Egypt he would bring back the fleet 
to Toulon, for the purpose of bringing it within the field of 
his spy-glass, in the manner of Bonaparte. Another time, 
he would go direct to Soult, and tell him bravely that he 
did not go out of Genoa with his army by the French, but 
by the Italian, gate ; and if Soult has been wounded at the 
battle of Salamanca, he will maintain, amidst the applause 
of the Chamber, that it was in the left leg and not in the 
right, as Soult himself had thought hitherto, and he will 
prove it so plausibly that the old general, the better to 
assure himself, will involuntarily put his finger in the cavity 
of his wound. 

Sometimes, he turns to bewailing his own lot, and no one 
then knows better how to act the victim. Anon, he as- 
sumes the tone of a misanthropic Cato, and emits a deep and 
doleful sigh for the perversities of opinion. He can also 
play the amiable to perfection, and when you think he is 
caressing you, he grips you like a cat. Ah ! the little 
traitor ! 

He loves power ; not for its own sake, but for the well- 
being which it procures. While M. Guizot has its pride, 
M. Thiers has its sensualism. This comes of the circum- 
stance that, for two-thirds of his life, he has been precluded 
from the enjoyments of fortune : he now stuffs himself with 
the voracity and selfishness of a starveling. 

M. Thiers is a demon of mind. He is full of it, I believe, 
to the extremities of the lips and even along to the tips of 
the nails. His organization resembles Voltaire's: — frail, 
delicate, variable, impressionable. 



292 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

He has the whims and frowardness of a child, with the 
pretensions to gravity of a philosopher. 

He is more a man of letters than a statesman, more an 
artist than a man of letters. He would passionately in- 
terest himself about an Etruscan vase ; "very little, for lib- 
erty. He has a statesman's conception of great designs, 
and a woman's audacity in small things. 

His courage is rather that of nervous people, a sort of 
feverish and fitful courage, which ends in convulsions and 
fainting. These weaknesses are excusable only upon a sofa. 
There should be no sv/ooning in politics. 

A great orator, a wavering minister, action cools and 
paralyzes him. Speaking, on the contrary, warms and 
transports him. 

His enthusiasm of other days for our revolutionary heroes 
was but the enthusiasm of a school-boy, with which was 
mixed, unconsciously to him, the spite of being nobody then, 
together with the vague hope of becoming one day a per- 
sonage. But the abuse of the ministerial luxuries soon 
effeminated his temperament, and he descended four by four 
the stair-steps from the garret to the drawing-room, install- 
mg himself, on the beautiful gold-fringed ottomans, just as if 
he had never sat upon his pallet of straw ; a gentleman by 
instinct, as others are by birth and habit. 

Minister or not, in France or out of it, this ostentatious 
taste never quits him. In the meantime, he might perhaps 
abstain from publishing and posting up his movements to 
the whole world, when he travels in quality of a private 
man, for his own pleasure or for ours. Good taste requires 
that announcements of this sort should be left to the exhib- 
itors of wild beasts, to play-actors, and princesses. 

Formerly, the mayors and provosts used to present to the 
Dukes of Montbazon and Montmorency the keys of the cities 
on plates of gold. In our day, vessels are freighted, can- 
nons fired, telegraphs worked for the Montbazons of the 
desk and the Montmorencys of the attorney's office. There 
is wanting to the resemblance but that they be attended by 



M . THIERS. 293 

a retinue of squires with falcons on their fists, of gentlemen- 
of-honor and pages. 

A sceptic from mere heedlessness, in morals, in religion, 
in politics, in literature, there are no truths which take deep 
hold on M. Thiers, no sincere and thorough devotion to the 
cause of the people which does not provoke his laughter. 
He resembles a lustrous silk which ever varies its hue and 
reflects to the sunlight all sorts of colors, without having 
any of its own, and through whose loose tissue you may see 
the light. 

Ask him not for firm convictions, he cannot form any ; 
for evidences of virility, his temperament is incapable of it. 
You dislike his bantering, but what, if all things appear to 
him laughable ! You complain that he ridicules you, but he 
ridicules himself as well ! 

Intrust him, if you please, with the ministry of the Ma- 
rine, of War, of the Interior, of Justice, of Foreign Affairs ; 
but take care how you place at his disposal millions and 
especially hundreds of millions, for they would pass like 
water through the riddle of his fingers. To this facility of 
his of squandering money, he joins a certain mode of ac- 
compting for it, which is not that of all the world, and this 
he calls, quite ingeniously,, the art of grouping figures. 

It would not be easy to gauge exactly the capacity of his 
political appetite. This only can be affirmed, that he hias 
been, and would be again a thousand times more, in case 
of opportunity, an immense consumer of men, of horses, 
of vessels of war, of munitions and of money. You would 
not say, to look at this manikin, that he has- a bigger 
stomach than another. But like Garagantua, he would 
swallow, at a mouthful, the largest budget. 

At once pliant and tenacious, indifferent and determined, 
he retracts but to return, he grants but to resume ; he leaves 
you but the alternative, which you cannot avoid offering 
him, and tagged to all his concessions you may find some- 
thing to this effect : " Do the one thing or the other, pro- 

25* 



294 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

vided you do the other :" " Give us either this or that, we 
care not, if only you give us that which we ask." 

I like, after all, this natural, lively, free-and-easy dis- 
courser. He converses with me, and never declaims. He, 
does not psalmodize everlastingly on the same tone, like the 
brother preachers of the Doctrine. It is true, indeed, he 
too ends, at the long run, by wearying me with his prattle. 
But it is a sort of warbling which is still a recreation from 
the oratorical monotony, that eternal bore, the most unbear- 
able of bores to a parliamentary martyr, condemned to 
suffer it from noon along to six in the evening. 

He does more than move, more than convince ; he in- 
terests, he amuses that people, which of all others, likes the 
most to be amused, to be amused still, to be amused always, 
even in matters of the greatest gravity. 

M. Thiers meditates without effort, and produces without 
exhaustion. He is insusceptible of fatigue, and the most 
rapid traveller of ideas that I know. Times and events 
pass before his memory in their due order and according to 
their dates, and nature, which others have to search for, pre- 
sents herself to him uncalled, in all the pomp of her majesty 
and all the graces of her smile. Have you observed on 
board the steamboats which plough our rivers, that glass sus- 
pended against the cabin-wall wherein the shore is reflected ? 
It exhibits in* rapid passage by you the beautiful villages, 
the tall-spired churches, the verdant meadows, the wood- . 
crowned mountains, the swelling sails of vessels, the yel- 
low corn-fields, the flocks of the valley, the clouds of the 
air, the animals and the men. Such is M. Thiers — a sort 
of parliamentary mirror, he reflects the passions of others, 
but has none himself; he weeps, but he has not a tear in 
his eyes ; he stabs himself with a dagger which does not 
draw a drop of blood. Pure acting all this, but what act- 
ing and what an actor ! What naturalness, what versatility ! 
what fertility of imitation ! what surprising inflexions of 
tone ! what transparence and lucidity in that style ! what 
graceful negligence in that diction ! — but no, you are de- 



M . THIERS. 295 

ceiving me, comedian, and you mean to deceive. You play 
your part admirably, but it is no more than a part ; all this 
I know, and yet I suffer myself to be carried away by your 
allurements ; I cannot resist so long as you speak, being 
under the influence of the charm, and I almost prefer hear- 
ing even error from your lips, to the truth from the lips of 
another ! 

For example, how consummate he was in the play of the 
Bastiles ! I have witnessed all the best exhibitions in the 
dramatic line, grand opera, comic opera, vaudeville and 
farce, which have appeared in the theatre of the Palais- 
Bourbon. But I must own that the fortifications of Paris 
are the most astonishing of the mystifications and other 
whirlio-iCTs which I have seen. Never did better comedian 
play poorer play. He dropped himself with such art, he 
attitudinized in that part with such an ingenuity of fan- 
tasy, he so animated the scene and produced so complete an 
illusion in all the spectators that they were unable to re- 
frain, even those who came to hiss him, from exclaiming : 
" Bravo ! perfectly played ! admirably done !" — and at the 
conclusion, so happy was his sleight-of-hand, that he placed 
the Chamber under his goblet, and then lifted it, but there 
was no Chamber, and the feat was complete ! 

M. Thiers has often given me the idea of a woman with- 
out a beard, an educated and intellectual woman — not stand- 
ing, but sitting, in the tribune — and knitting a chit-chat about 
a thousand topics, jumping from one to another with a light 
gracefulness, and witli no appearance of the slightest men- 
tal exertion upon her ever- moving lips. 

He is suppler than the most attenuated steel spring. He 
bends himself, he relaxes himself, he sinks or rises with his 
subject. He turns himself spirally around the question, 
from the trunk along to the top. He mounts, descends, re- 
mounts, suspends himself from the branches, hides in the 
thickest of the foliage, appears, disappears, and performs a 
thousand tricks, with the pretty agility of a squirrel. 



296 I{ E V O 1. U T I O N O F JULY. 

He would extract money from a rock. Where others do 
but glean, he reaps a harvest. 

He claps the wing, he basks in the sun. He takes the 
tints by turns, of purple, of gold and of azure. He does not 
speak, he coos ; he does not coo, he whistles ; he does not 
whistle, he warbles, and is so enchanting both in color and 
melody, that one knows not which to admire the most, his 
voice or his plumage. 

M. Thiers can make you a speech of three hours long, 
upon architecture, poetry, law, naval affairs, military strat- 
egy, although neither poet, nor architect, nor jurist, nor 
sailor, nor soldier, provided he is allowed an afternoon's 
preparation. He must have astounded his oldest chiefs of 
division when he used to dissert to them on the subject of 
adminstration. To hear him talk of curves, arches, abut- 
ments, hydraulic mortar, you would have thought him a 
mason, if not an architect. He would dispute upon chem- 
istry with Gay-Lussac, and teach Arago how to point his 
telescope upon Venus or Jupiter. 

His discourse on the state of Belgium is a masterpiece of 
historical exposition. In the affair of Ancona, he explained 
strategetical positions, bastions, polygons, counterscarps, re- 
doubts, to the astonishment of officers of genius. He was 
taken for one of the trade, for a man of learning. 

Fine arts, canals, rail-roads, finance, commerce, history, 
journalism, transcendental politics, street-regulations, thea- 
tres, war, literature, religion, municipalities, morals, amuse- 
ments, great things, middling things, small things, what mat- 
ters it to him ? He is at home in all. He is prepared upon 
all subjects, because he is prepared upon none. He does not 
speak like other orators, because he speaks like all the world. 
Other orators premeditate more or less, but he extemporizes. 
Other orators perorate, but he converses ; and how are you 
to be on your guard against a man who talks like you, like me, 
better than you, than I, than any other person. Other ora- 
tors, behind the scenes, betray some glimpse of the buskin, 
and by the reflection of the mirror you may see their wav- 



M . T 11 1 E R 3 . 297 

ing plumes. They arc ready laced, attired, and the foot 
pointed forward. They wait but the rise of the curtain to 
advance upon the stage. On the contrary, you seize M. 
Thiers as he dismounts from his horse, and you say to him : 
Come, hasten, the hall is full and the public await you im- 
patiently ; take your mask and play what character you 
choose, a minister, a general, an artist, a puritan, but act 
M. Thiers will not allow himself the time to wipe the per 
spiration from his brow and drink a glass of sugared water 
He does not even unboot himself; he enters upon the stage 
he bows, he attitudinizes, he grimaces before the spectators 
he improvisates the characters, arranges the dialogue, un 
ravels the plots and learns his part in playing it. He plays 
sometimes two of them, turns ahout, doffs his mask, puts on 
another ; and always the same he is always different, always 
in his element, always a consummate actor. 

I have however to reproach him with smiling sometimes 
at his success as he descends from the tribune. A good 
comedian who would maintain the illusion of the public re- 
specting the reality of his part, ought never to laugh at the 
farce he has just been playing. In this respect, I admit it, 
M. Thiers has still some progress to make. 

If M. Thiers spoke less quickly, he would be less listened 
to. But he precipitates his phraseology with so much volu- 
bility, that the apprehension of the Chamber can neither 
precede nor even follow it. In this point of view, liis de- 
fect is an advantage, and he is more of an artist than he in- 
tends. He ends sometimes, it is true, by losing himself in 
the details, and rambles, from right to left, so far from the 
subject that he breaks off without concluding. Might not 
this also be, in case of need, an effect, rather than a defect, 
of his art ? 

Once started, he would gallop on, without stopping, from 
matins to vespers. 

It rarely happens that these great talkers are great poli- 
ticians. Often they chance to say what were better omitted, 
and omit what ought to be said. They are, ordinarily, vain, 



298 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

giddy, peremptory, presumptuous. By getting them to 
speak, a thing always easy, you lead them into the snare 
of their indiscretion. More reserve is requisite for the con- 
duct of state affairs. 

I am almost tempted to think that M. Thiers has too much 
intellect for a minister. Distrust, for the purposes of govern- 
ment, those men who talk too much, and above all those who 
talk too well ! 

Each form of government has its defects. In represen- 
tative governments the orators alone lead the majorities, and 
the majorities alone make the ministers. Every minister to 
have influence must be an orator, and every minister who is 
an orator may not be a statesman. Colbert and Sully were 
not orators ; they could not have been minister in our time. 
J. J. Rousseau could not put together two phrases in public. 
Talleyrand* would have stopped short at the end of a quar- 
ter-hour's parliamentary conversation. Chateaubriand hes- 
itates, and Montesquieu would probably have been discom- 
fited in a wordy contest by the lowest clerk of the lowest 
attorney of Brives-la-Gaillarde. 

Certainly, M. Dupin presides, makes orations, brings in 
requisitions to a wonder ; yet placed at the ministerial table, 
he would not have^wo ideas at the tail of one another, and 
would change his opinion forty-five times in forty-five min- 
utes. M. Thiers has more stability, he is less unequal, less 
caustic, less versatile. He does not put his maxims into 
epigrams. He will not kill his colleagues with a bon-mot. 
But has he the spirit of sequence, of direction, of persever- 
ance, of wisdom, indispensable to great affairs ? Does he 
not yield too easily to the dominion of a system, to the ca- 
price of an idea? Is he not too irresolute, too wavering, 
then too precipitate, too decisive ? Has he not more fire than 
judgment? Does not his imagination of artist transport him 
into devious excursions ? Does he not allow himself to be 
dazzled and determined by the grandeur of thing§ rather 

* So, too, witli Franklin, and several others of the like mental 
character. 



M.THIERS. 299 

than by their utility, by the adventurous rather than by the 
practicable ? He has no faith in the devotion of virtue, nor 
in the miracles of honor ; he believes firmly but in the power 
of gold ; this gold he would squander by the ton to build a 
triumphal arch upon some foolish conquest. He seems un- 
conscious that the public money is the chyle and blood of 
the people ; that this blood is precious and ought to be hus- 
banded ; that economy is the first of public virtues, and that 
the best of governments is, on the whole, that which costs 
the least. M. Guizot and his school have dried up our souls. 
M. Thiers and his school would empty our pockets. The 
one would deprive us of the small remnant of our virtue, 
the other of the remaining pittance of our money. They 
have both succeeded so well, with the aid of the Camarillay 
that there is no longer amongst us any political probity, that 
we have ceased to have faith in anything or upon anything ; 
and I do not think I calumniate my country in saying that, 
thanks to these gentlemen, the office-holders of France are 
the most spiritless, the most passive, the most servile, and the 
most corrupt of all Europe. 

Reader, have you chanced to see M. Thiers rise to speak 
in the Chamber ? Have you not admired the resourceful 
fertility of that brilliant and ingenious intellect ? Have you 
seen him contending against M. de Salvandy on the Spanish 
question? It was the combat of the lively, nimble and dar- 
ing matadore with a colossal and unwieldy ox. M. de Sal- 
vandy, caparisoned all over, perspired and puffed in his la- 
borious argumentation. Thiers laid on him about the ears 
and the loins, inflicting a thousand wounds. At last, he 
took him by the horns, and prostrated him in the arena amid 
the laughter of the spectators. 

The clowns mounted on the iiorses of Franconi create an 
illusion to the eyes of the multitude, when they wave in 
their hands several small parti-colored banners. What the 
clowns do in the circus, M. Thiers does in the tribune. 

When he perceives his conversation languish and the audi- 
ence begin to yawn, he turns suddenly to the Right, which 



300 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

is entirely unprepared for such a sally, and launches directly 
towards it some stirrin^^ phrases which he keeps in reserve, 
about the victory of Jemmape and the tri-color standard. 
This quasi-revolutionary tirade never fails of its effect, and 
the sabre-bearers pick up the unhorsed orator who hastens 
to resume his saddle. 

On another occasion, the point will be, whether M. Thiers 
has been able to create several additional regiments by a 
simple ordinance, without the iiUervention of the Chambers 
and without law. This will be the v/hole question. Very 
well ! M. Thiers will pass over that constitutional consid- 
eration, and launch eccentrically into an eulogy on the 
heroism of the officers of the army, to win the applause 
of their fellaws of the Chamber. This device will be 
laughed at. Laugh on, gentlemen, laugh as much as you 
please. Laugh especially at yourselves and your ex- 
penses, for he has gained his cause which is very far from 
being yours ! 

His broken voice sinks, softens and fills as it were with 
tears when he comes to speak of his king, the virtues of his 
king, of his worthy ministers, of their noble and paternal 
administration. What think you, by the way, of that noble 
and paternal administration which has strangled freedom of 
discussion and inflicted upon us the amiable laws of Sep- 
tember ? M. Thiers must have a pretty laugh at all this 
in the evening, seated in his snug little opera-box ; and how 
he must think us a good sort of people ! 

He unites so much ministerial talent with so much politi- 
cal inconsistency, and so much oratorical fertility with so 
much giddiness of conduct, that he can scarcely be either 
employed or dispensed with. M. Thiers is an aid which 
will always be an embarrassment. 

To-day in the garb of reformer, to-morrow replaced in 
the ministry, he will be able, from time to time, to command 
the parliamentary forces. But he will never have soldiers 
of his own, like Guizot, Berryer, and Odillon-Barrot ; for 
he is not to be recognized either by the form of his tent — 



M. THIERS. 301 

which he pitches now in one place, then in another — nor by 
the color of his banner, which has a Ihtle of red, a little 
blue, and a little white, but which is neither red. nor blue, 
nor white. 

Men without political morality are wonderfully well cal- 
culated to govern Assemblies without principle. Besides, 
in France, all things are excused in people of mind, even 
the changing their principles. It is only the blockheads who 
are not allowed to be inconstant. 

I was mistaken — and who would not have made the same 
mistake — when I once said, that, notwithstanding his talent, 
M. Thiers would never reach the first post in the state, be- 
cause he lacked all sorts of consideration. Consideration is 
the fruit of an elevated probity, like that of M. Dupont de 
I'Eure ; or of a political character which has never belied 
itself, like that of General Lafayette; or of an immense 
fortune acquired by long toil, like that of Casimir-Perier ; 
or of a patronage of long standing and a princely gener- 
osity, like that of M. Lafitte ; or of high dignity and even 
(it must be owned, under the prejudice of our weak notions) 
of high birth, like that of the Duke de Broglie ; or of mili- 
tary rank and the splendor of victories, and services ren- 
dered by a life of glory, like that of Marshal Gerard ; or 
of illustrious ancestry and personal gravity, like that of M. 
Mole ; or of a dignified and modest life, like that of Royer- 
Collard ; or it sometimes proceeds from grace of manner 
and a polished affability of address, like that of M. de Tal- 
leyrand — and this is a quality not to be disdained in a coun- 
try where the immovable master sends his orders to the 
Cabinet, and the ministers are nothing more than Tjlerks and 
factors. But, to which of these several kinds of considera- 
tion does M. Thiers pretend ? We should be much at a loss 
to say — and so would he himself. 

And yet M. Thiers has been twice prime minister, although 
wanting this consideration ; and what is still more extraor- 
dinary, he has fallen into disgrace, and he has not been 

26 



302 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

sent, for the amusement of the sultan, an ambassador to the 
grand seignior ! 

The Doctrinarian party too, who in the early days of the 
Restoration had taken him into their pay, had never taken 
him into their esteem. All in patting him on the back to 
flatter him, they dreaded his cat-like springs and claws. 
They never seated him by them on the sofa. They kept 
him at a distance. They regarded him as a man without 
consistency or principle, linked to them by complicity in the 
same misdeeds, but who could never rise to the height of 
their axioms, and whose coat, well-brushed though it was, 
always betrayed, amidst the embroidery, certain stains of 
revolutionary mire. 

M. Thiers, on his part, bore their haughty yoke with im- 
patience. He bent, he writhed, he stooped to the earth, be- 
fore them ; but it was for the purpose of taking by the legs. 
Hidden in his hole, he burrowed their ruin. He worked 
with hands and feet to sap the edifice of their greatness. 
He was the mole of the ministry. 

M. Thiers made, about this time, some very remarkable 
progress in religion. The sole topics at court and in the 
tribune Mere God and his angels, paradise, the blessed Vir- 
gin, the Holy Catholic Church, the holy benedictions of 
Heaven, the holy martyrs, the holy miracles, and the applica- 
tion of Providence to politics. In the mouths of the strange 
characters who uttered these words, this was a sort of blas- 
phemy. The philosophers of Grenelle-street knelt humbly 
on cushions of gold and purple, and Atheism became devotee. 
How is it to be supposed that with this state of things the 
dynasty should not have been preserved ? 

For the rest, M. Thiers, without being quite a holy man, 
is not a naturally bad one ; he has not the force either to 
love or to hate. He may be pushed to excesses, but he will 
not commit them unprovoked. If he is light in character 
and impudent in manners, these defects are to be ascribed 
to his bad education : where could he have learned the pro- 



M . THIERS. 303 

prieties of demeanor? But he is not a man to do evil for 
evil's sake. 

Nor do I think him a man to love money, for its own 
sake ; and it is great candor in me, it is almost courage, -to 
say so. For I had been for a long time persuaded of the 
contrary. 

I must also say, that M. Thiers resigned his place for 
reasons which were honorable, and even logical, considered 
in his point of view ; that he comported himself not without 
dignity and disinterestedness, and that neither he nor M. 
Guizot, on retiring from office, have imitated those shabby 
personages whom we liave seen carry off with them what- 
ever was not too hot or too heavy. 

In fine, I hold M. Thiers, I repeat it, to be a man of won- 
derful mind, a mind of great fertility of expedients, of ver- 
satilUy, of clearness, of address, of keenness, and at the 
same time of a naturalness that pleases all the more that it 
contrasts the more with the ambitious magnificence of the 
tribune. 

But also what affectation to talk constantly of his probity ! 
What cruel and detestable irony to vaunt his fidelity to the 
Revolution of July, he who has so utterly betrayed it ! — he 
the admirer of the Convention, who tagged himself to the 
tail of a quasi-legitimist majority ! he, a son of the people, 
who yet advocated a hereditary peerage ! he, the panegyrist 
of the republican Danton, who afterwards used to place 
himself on both knees to play with his king's shoe-buckles, 
and who made himself the intimate confidant of the delicate 
secrets of the wardrobe ! he, who, beyond all others, should 
have kept his place at the tribune, and who preferred to shut 
himself up in suspicious supervision of the secret funds and 
the telegraphs ! 

M. Thiers thought that a Court parvenu, a mushroom 
forced into rapid growth by revolutionary dung, might gain 
the height of an oak and protect eternally the Tuileries with 
its shade. But as soon as the tempest is over, the mush- 
rocms sink back into the earth. Kings avail themselves of 



804 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

people of this low description, but when they are prcsslngly 
in need of them, or when they are afraid. Monarchies as- 
similate but with arisiocracies. These are the branches and 
folia^je of the same tree : both have too;ether but the same 
life, and draw from the same soil their same and common 
nutriment. This M. Thiere has not observed, a circum- 
stance which does little credit to his judgment. 

After his first dismissal, M. Thiers rowed between Scylla 
and Charybdis with an incredible dexterity of tugging, avoid- 
ing the left without making the right ; you see plefinly that 
he has passed through the straits of the ministry of Foreign 
Affairs. His speeches of that period, prepared in advance 
and extremely elaborated, are little master-pieces for the use 
of ministerial aspirants. He there intimates to the dynastic 
Opposition, with a caressing kindness, the price of his new 
friendship. He assures, merely in passing, M. Mole that he 
may half-reckon upon his disdainful protection, and he over- 
whelms Guizot with mockery of his defeat ; but all this 
with a cat's pace, in muffled words. To good hearers, the 
meaning was that each of the two parties would be too happy 
to have recourse to him. But, an ally too uncertain of the 
one, an ally too recent of the other, M. Thiers was not enough 
of a revolutionist for the Opposition, and not enough of a 
royalist for the Doctrinarians. 

Contrary to my habits, I lengthen, I lengthen a little this 
portrait. But, reader, it is indispensable ; I have to do with 
the most long-winded of our speech-makers, and I promised 
to give you a good likeness. If, however, I begin to weary 
you, you have but to say so, and I will lay down my pen. 
But I do not think the painter, or rather his subject, fatigues 
you yet, and I am going to profit of the ministerial inter- 
reign, the point at which I am now arrived, to sum up the 
personage. 

Ready for all things, to labor, to banquet, to converse, to 
idle, to keep awake, to fall asleep — fit for all things, for 
statistics, for finance, for history and geography, for mili- 
tary strategy, for belles-lettres, for the fine arts, for the 



M . T II I E R S . ■ 305 

practical sciences, for social economy, for the public works, 
for political scheming — not doubting of anything, if it be 
not sometimes of himself — unable to dispense with others, 
who in turn cannot do without him — neither too constitu- 
tional to give alarm to the Court, nor too monarchical to dis- 
please the Constitutionalists — a man of circumstance in a 
country of circumstance, a man of the moment in our gov- 
ernments of the moment — believing in nothing in a society 
where nothing is believed in, and perfectly formed after its 
image and likeness — the ablest of all the writers and states- 
men who have ever mounted upon their flying cars the ar- 
tillery of the press — a plausible speaker, universal and in- 
terminable — an artist in business, beyond all other artists — 
disdainful of charters and laws for having with impunity 
violated them — disdainful of men, for having, I was going to 
say corrupted, but it will be more polite to say seduced, 
them — veering his bark of fortune to the wind of all sys- 
tems, and setting all her sail at once, though she were to be 
dashed the next instant against a thousand shoals — presump- 
tuous and fastidious, daring and timid — entering upon the 
course with intention to outstrip space itself, and stopping at 
the obstacle of a grain of sand — a vagabond of ideas, a pro- 
jector of plans, a seeker of expedients, an undertaker of 
adventures, a bastard of principles like the cause he serves 
— so embroiled in, so intermingled with all the coteries, all 
the state secrets, all the movements, all the windings, all 
the weaknesses, all the fears, all the littlenesses, all the do- 
mesticities of this regime, and so adherent, so glued to its 
loins and its very bones, like the shirt of Nessus-, that he 
cannot be detached without tearing away some fragments of 
his flesh — in fine, a veritable Frenchman — Frenchman of 
our age — such as we are told ho ought to be and as it would 
perhaps be impossible that he were not, M. Thiers, whether 
minister, deputy, or citizen, will always be, under the species 
of monarchy in which we live, amongst the most considerable 
men, nay, the most considerable of all ; the word is written 
and I maintain it. 

26* 



<306 > REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

I could wish, for my part, M. Thiers did not make so many- 
passages back and forth across his slop-pool of first presi- 
dencies, wherein I with difficulty see my way ; and I leave 
you to think what the task would be to classify, compare, 
enumerate, define, admire the positions and merits of the 
secondary counsellors of the cabinet. Verily, it would be 
to lose one's self in a chaos ; and to increase tlie confusion 
when the company of M. Thiers comes to fail, piles of ac- 
compt books at once encumber the bureau of the Chamber. 
Ministers, directors, chiefs, clerks, and down to the runners, 
all hasten to obtain their examination and discharge at the 
tribune, in the newspapers and at the treasury. M. Thiers, 
the examiner-in-chief, rises to speak some twenty-five times 
in succession, ergotizes like an attorney upon every item, 
affects more than the scrupulousness of Bareme, masks an 
expenditure, skips a cipher, and disputes a sous. And then 
erecting the head by slow degrees, he extends his little arms, 
and threatens with the wrath of the gods and the contempt of 
mankind, whosoever should find anything to censure in so 
much financial genius and so much intrepid retrenchment. 

Following his example, each of the associates self-styled 
responsible, of this fulminant Agamemnon, prattles and bat- 
tles for his little fraction of the ministry. He imagines 
France has her eyes upon him, and that posterity is already 
in anxiety about his official conduct. Go back to your 
shops, ye word-pedlars, get you gone ! the parliamentary 
curfew has tolled, let each of you go to bed ! Good night ! 

How, I ask you, will posterity view these miserable min- 
isterial quarrels, between the although and the because, be- 
tween M. Peter and M. Paul, between Mr. this and Mr. 
that ? To signalize these great ministers to the admiration 
of futurity, to elevate them beacons along the shores of time, 
every day of the Gregorian calendar has been exhausted. 
It is the 2nd November, the 15^/t March, the 22nd February, 
the Qtli September, the 2Qth October, .... the, I know not 
what other date, of wliat other month, of all the months 
which God has made. It is fortunate that all these persons 



M . THIERS 307 

have not taken it into their heads to call themselves the min- 
istry of St. Polycarp, of St. Nicholas, of St. Pacomius, St. 
Bonaventure ; otherwise, as things go, all the saints of Par- 
adise would end with having this ministerial appendage. 

■For the rest, names, dates, principles, systems, persons 
are of little concern to M. Thiers ; that is not what he is 
about. When out of office, whether by resignation or dis- 
missal, he is always in pursuit of the ministry, even when 
he appears to be aiming at nothing, and he holds himself in 
the leash of the Chamber, in full readiness to pounce upon 
his prey. It is in this way that for the second time — and I 
have to share the blame — he slipped into power between two 
conflicting ballots. 

But his antecedents have pitilessly shackled him, and he 
has been weak because he had been so before ; inconstant, 
because he had been already inconstant ; rambling, in his 
foreign policy, from England to Russia and from Russia to 
England, and, in the interior, from the people to the Court 
and from the Court to the people, without being once able to 
choose or to decide. 

It is also in some degree the fault of Parliament. Who 
can conceive the empire of phraseology in the French Cham- 
bers ? They are deluded, they are excited, and they forget 
all the faults, all the anterior facts, all the crimes even, of 
the speaker. They can withstand examples, figures, expe- 
rience, logic. But they find it impossible to resist the elabo- 
rate artifices of speech-makers and sophists. These are the 
favorites in representative governments. A man of forty 
years is made a diplomatist, merely because his tongue is 
well-strung to the palate and that he can spout empty phrases 
by the thousand : but what diplomatists ! 

M. Thiers was mistaken like a child, and upon almost 
every subject. He did not comprehend that there could 
exist between despotic and constitutional governments, but a 
varnished peace and mendacious alliances. He did not 
comprehend that if the regiments of Europe were retained 
under arms, it is that a volcano of liberty mutters and 



308 REVOLU-TION OF JULY. 

rumbles underneath the thrones of absolute kings. But 
there is a sort of mutual insurance between these kings. 
Fear is stronger in them than ambition. They, no doubt, 
prefer usurpation to anarchy, but they prefer legitimacy to 
usurpation. 

Principles alone make revolutions and revolutionizers. 
Principles alone make monarchies, aristocracies, republics, 
parliaments. Principles alone make morality and religion, 
peace and war. Principles lead the world. 

True, M. Thiers affirms that there are no principles ; 
which means that M. Thiers has none. This is all. 

He was also mistaken in 1837 respecting Spain, who was 
not able, he said, to defend herself against the Carlists, and 
in 1840, respecting Syria, who would, he said, defend her- 
self all alone against the English. 

It was yet summer, and he intended making war not 
till the ensuing spring ; but Egypt would have been con- 
quered, Mehemet beheaded, Algiers blockaded, and France 
invaded, by autumn. The last street-runner of the Foreign 
Office would have foreseen this, but not M. Thiers. 

It had besides been expedient to oppose ideas to the can- 
non. But M. Thiers had neither ideas nor cannon. At 
last, imagining that he made Louis Philippe obnoxious and 
Europe afraid, he hid the parliamentary government behind 
the personal, and France behind a little grotto of shell-work. 
Was not this a grand and judicious policy ! 

M. Thiers assures us that his responsibility does not suffer 
him to sleep. So much the worse, and that is the evil. A 
minister after midnight ought always to sleep. Alexander, 
Conde, and Napoleon, had to be awaked from a heavy sleep 
the morning of the battles of Arbala, Rocroy, and Auster- 
litz. M. Thiers, it is true, has not, that I know, as yet 
gained any battles of this kind. 

A minister ought to survey every peril of the state with- 
out panic or precipitation, and with an elevated and steady 
glance ; it is for this that he is minister. Say not that M. 
Thiers was ruled by the Court. A bad excuse ! He had 



ivi . T II r E R s . 309 

but two courses to take, either to surmount the occult power 
which trod him down, or to send in his resignation. Unfor- 
tunately, it is always but after the event that M. Thiers 
comes to know that he should have done what he has not 
done, and omitted what he has. He starts always too soon, 
but to arrive too late. 

In fine, he has, in his last ministry, been more considerate 
towards his adversaries than sei'viceabfe to his friends. He 
was content with a majority of personal property and rent- 
roll, instead of a majority of sympathy and of principle. 
He had neither the sense to avoid the snares laid by his sub- 
ordinates, nor to fly the deceitful caresses of his master ; 
neither to dissolve the Chamber nor to convoke it ; neither 
to enter into the alliance nor to relinquish it ; to advance in 
time the fleet, nor to recall it ; neither to employ that tem- 
perate and courteous language which assuages, nor take 
those sudden and decisive steps which intimidate — neither 
to negotiate, nor to conquer, nor to govern. 

He, who was to break up the quadruple alliance, to open 
with his lance the barriers of the Rhine, to cut down to the 
level of a ferry-boat the frigates of the British squadron, hoist 
the tri-colored flag on the forts of Alexandria, cruise tri- 
umphantly upon the French lake of the Mediterranean, and, 
from his ministerial horn, pour torrents of riches and pros- 
perities over his country ; what has he in fact done ? Why, 
bequeathed us for whole legacy the miserable disdain and 
ridicule of the Cossacks and Pandours of Constantinople 
and St. Petersburgh;, and of the cockneys and bullies of 
London, the resurrection of personal government, the revi- 
val of the laws of September, five hundred millions of pub- 
lic debt, the wasteful and devouring poltrooneries of the 
" armed peace," and the embastillement of Paris — stupid 
enough to allow its incarceration, still more infatuated to 
applaud it ! 

When M. Thiers jumps into the ministerial car, it is very 
necessary to beware of his Phaeton-like driving ; and I con- 
fess, for my part, that I never feel quite at ease, and am al- 



310 REVOLUTION OF JULY. 

ways ready to cry out : Farmers, hoard your grain, tlie 
tax is about to be doubled. Fathers, embrace your sons for 
the last time perhaps, they are to be called away from you. 
Capitalists, sell your scrip, the funds are falling. Soldiers, 
draw your cutlasses, the blood is going to flow. King, what 
die of fortune is there at the bottom of your box ? And 
you, Liberty, be armed and on your guard ! 

Since the most irftellectual of our men of intellect (esprit) 
has brought us to this pitch, I every night offer a prayer to 
God, that he may give us to be governed to a downright 
blockhead. If our state be nothing the less bad for it, it 
will at least be different. 

And yet, M. Thiers not only has all the capacity which 
it is possible to have, but is also as true a Frenchman as 
any citizen of this country. He has a sentiment of nation- 
ality, so deep, so generous, so genuine, that I feel the re- 
proach of his faults, in spite of me, expire upon my lips. 
But France, so basely treated — France, who expected from 
his incomparable talents the exterior triumph of her arms 
and the parliamentary restoration of her liberty — France, 
more severe than I, rises in accusation against him, and I 
hear her address him and his fellows in these words : 

" Men of July, you whom I have raised from obscurity, 
you whom I have taken by the hand and borne from step to 
step to the summit of power, vvhat have you done with my 
honor? Wherefore am I become the laughing-stock of 
Europe? Wherefore is it that, when the outraged na- 
tions look their oppressors in the face, I am present no 
longer to their hopes, (^r even their memory ? Wherefore 
does my name no more recur to their lips, when they murmur 
the sacred accents of liberty? Have I then shed my best 
blood only to expiate the triumph of my principle, by the 
bitter mockery of its present consequences ? Independence, 
liberty, country, honor, virtue, you have bartered them all 
for gold. You have infected with your cowardly terrors those 
Assemblies who, formerly, launched our fourteen armies 
upon the enemy j that peasantry whence emanated the he- 



M. T II I ER S. 311 

roes of our great wars ; those deluded operatives who will 
not have learned to understand you, until after you have 
robbed and ruined them. You have been to the extremity 
of Europe to beseech a petty king to have the goodness to 
accept the money of our citizens and our laborers, and you 
have been seen to cross the Atlantic, tribute in hand, to beg 
at the knees of wily America, the pardon of General Jack- 
son, and the oblivion of our victories ! Continue to degrade 
your establishment. Trick it off in the magnificent tin- 
sel ry of police order and stock-jobbing. Act the dressing- 
room valets to your string of little princes. Act the mar- 
quises of rCEil-de-Boeuf with hob-nailed shoes and tavern 
oaths. Assume the air of heroes and conquerors to the 
priests of the Prophet and the soldiers of the Pope, while the 
lance of an Austrian pandour shall freeze you with terror. 
Let fear be your principle in all things and upon all occa- 
sions. Cast into the limbo of the future, parliamentary re- 
form, equality of suffrage, retrenchment of taxation, and the 
organization of industry. Marshal your governmental theo- 
ries under guard of your police constables. Suspend over 
our heads the gloomy and latent terrors of your confiscations 
and exilements. Violate the sanctity and the modesty of 
our domestic hearths. Calculate at the price currents upon 
the arm of your sofas, what may be the cost of the con- 
science of some concocter of Charters or government stipen- 
diary ; but respect for the virtue of the people ! do not ex- 
hibit to its view the puppet-show of your apostasies and the 
corruption of your examples! 

" Away ! the love of Liberty, which, beneath your im- 
pure breath, now fades and expires in the soul, will not be 
slow to take new life when the time shall come ; and what- 
ever you may do to brutalize this noble people, there will 
I'emain enough of intelligence to comprehend all the evil 
you had done, and justice enough to punish the perpe- 
trators !" 

No, France, do not talk of punishing, for they are already 
sufficiently punished ! That logic which they have violated 



312 REVOLUTION OF J IJ L Y . 

recoils upon them with the weight of a mountain — the min- 
isterial bench has been to them a bench of thorns and of 
troubles — those official carousals of power have quickly 
cloyed them — those cups of political drunkenness which 
they emptied at a draught, have left upon their lips but the 
sediment of sorrow — those ill-omened days around the Coun- 
cil table have been marked but by disappointments, rivalries 
and intrigues — those sleepless nights passed beneath the 
golden ceilings of their palaces, would be well exchanged 
for the nights of the poor man in his cabin — those slippery 
majorities have slipped through their fingers — those false 
friends have betrayed them — that prince of whom they 
adored the foot-prints has left them forever — that people 
whom they have oppressed, repudiates them — that press 
which they have crushed to the earth, is now turning upon 
them with the sting of the scorpion. 

No, France, do not say that they are not sufficiently pun- 
ished ! Is it not to be so sufficiently, to behold thee so hum- 
ble and insignificant, thee in other days so grand and so 
glorious ! so limping in gait and so straggling in pace, thee 
who used to march like a queen in the vanguard of nations f 
so timorous, so squat, so crouching in thine eyry of bastilles, 
thee who used to bear aloft in thy eagle talons, the European 
thunder-bolt of battles ! 

No, doubtless, they misconceive thy character ! No, 
doubtless, they did not imbue themselves with thy lofty 
spirit and thy manly genius ! But no more have they ever, 
in the wildest of their errors, despaired of thy fortunes. Their 
souls are full, like ours, with the sentiment of thy independ- 
ence and greatness. Old France, cradle of our forefathers, 
land of liberty, native country, country, that eternal vision 
of our hearts, they love thee, I attest it, as we love thee, as 
thou oughtest to be loved, as we love our sons, as we love 
our mothers, as the worthy, as the holy object of our pure, 
of our undying affection ! They would lay down their prop- 
erty and lives as we would lay down our property and our 
lives, to serve, and to save thee ! Ah ! thou shouldst for- 



M. THIERS. 313 

give much to those who shall have much loved thee ! Suf. 
fer us, therefore, to offer thee in expiation of their past career 
both our sorrow and their sacrifices, both our hopes and their 
regrets. Clasp them with us, I conjure thee, to thy maternal 
bosom; they will return to thee, they loved thee, they are 
thy children, do not curse them ! 

27 



V 



LIBRAEY I 






314 O 'conn ELL, 



O'CONNELL.* 



Scarce had the brilliant Mirabeau, of a sudden veiled by 
the vapors of the tomb, gone down in the full splendor of 
his meridian, than a new luminary was seen to rise upon 
the horizon of Ireland. 

MirabeaUj O'Connell ! towering beacons, planted at the 
two extremities of the revolutionary cycle, as if to open and 
to close its ever memorable scenes. 

If my design was to consider O'Connell but as a parlia- 
mentary orator, I might compare the British nation with ours, 
and our tribune with the British ; I might say that the latter 
has more country-gentlemen of eccentric and inveterate 
prejudices, and the former contains more special pleaders and 
pretentious judgers ; that the English deputy does every, 
thing for his party, the French deputy everything for him- 
self; that the one is an aristocrat even in his democracy, 
and the other democratic even in his aristocracy ; that the 
one is more proud of great things, the other more boastful 
of small ; that the one is always systematic in his opposi- 
tion, and the other almost always individual ; that the one 
is more sensible to interest, to calculation, to expediency, to 
reason, and the other to imagery, to eloquence, to the sur- 
prises and adventures of political tactics ; that the one is 
more sarcastic and more harsh, and the other more inclined 
to personality of the keen and scoffing kind ; that the one^Ts 
more grave and more religious, and the other more volatile 

* Tliis is the only foreigner who has been honored with a place in 
the Gallery. He was probably intended to feemplify principally 
the author's idea of the species of oratory which he terms popular. — 
(Tr.^s N.) 



O CONNELL. 315 

and more unbelieving; that the one stuffs his harangues 
with citations=^' from Virgil, Homer, the Bible, Shakspeare, 
Milton, and that the other could not mention the names and 
events of his own national history without making the mem- 
bers yawn, or exciting the laughter of both the spectators 
and the parliament ; that the one acts but with effort, slowly, 
upon heads of much solidity but massive and heavy, while 
the other is divined by the intelligence prompt and penetra- 
tive of his auditors, before the phrase has quite left his lips; 
that the one constructs leisurely the scaffolding of his lengthy 
periods of indefinite argumentations, bristling with science, 
jurisprudence and literature, whilst the other would shock 
the simple and delicate taste of our nation, by a heap of met- 
aphors, however beautiful, and would fatigue our intellect 
by a contexture too strong and stringent of his reasonings. 

* This is a reproach which I am sorry to think more applicable to 
the speaking in our own Congress than to the oratory of Great 
Britain, at least of the present day. It is painful, indeed, to good 
taste, and even to good sense— of which, in truth, taste is but the fine 
flower— to witness the unclassical frequency of classical quotations 
by even those who are considered among the most respectable of our 
debaters, and really not illiterate men. But worse still than the fre- 
quency is its commonplace crudity : you see the material quite raw 
from Plutarch's Lives, or Lempriere's Dictionary, or some other of 
the school books, and in fact worked up like a school-boy's exercise 
and no very ripe school-boy's. If I remember, it was no less a per- 
sonage than Mr. Benton who found or forced occasion to turn into 
a speech on the - Oregon question" the contents of entire pages of 
Homer's Odyssey— what translation did not appear. Nor is this 
primitive passion to deck their nakedness with scraps of finery con- 
fined to our orators of the less cultivated party. One, perhaps two 
of the Boston representatives, I believe, are remarkable in this way. 
Probably they deem it called for by the character of the " Athens of 
America." But that this is not exactly the atticism of the Athens 
of Attica, they could hardly have failed to know, had they really 
read to any purpose what they so freely quote to quite as little. 

Do we find anything of this sort in the severely simple style of 
Webster ? Yet Webster has more classical literature in his mere 
memory than any dozen of those who are most profuse of it probably 
ever saw in the original. (Tr.'s N.) 



316 O 'con NELL. 

I might add that the English nation has more force, and 
the French more grace. There more genius, here more intel- 
lect. There more character, here more imagination. There 
more political prudence, here more impulsive generosity. 
There, more forecast, here more actuality. There, more 
profundity of philosophical speculation and more respect for 
the dignity of the human species, here more propensity to 
contemplate one's self coquettishly, in the glass of his ora- 
tory, without taking account of the merits and perfections of 
others. The one in fine of these nations more jealbus of 
liberty, the other of equality. The one more proud, the 
other more vain. The one besotted with bigotry, the other 
sceptical in almost all things. The one capable of prepar- 
ing and awaiting the triumph of its cause, the other precip- 
itating the occasion and impatient to vanquish, no matter 
under what leaders. The one retiring into some seques- 
tered corner to indulge its dumps, the other capering about 
and at the first preludings of the fiddle, mixing in all sorts 
of quadrilles. The Englishman computing how much his 
blood should bring him of territory and influence, and his 
money of interest, the Frenchman squandering the one with- 
out knowing where, and the other without knowing why.* 

* I do not assent to the justice, in all respects, of this elaborate pa- 
rallel. The writer seems to me to view the English through the pre- 
judices of his nation, and the French through the prejudices of his 
party. Not that, in this instance, the error is unfiivorable to the 
English, but the contrary. I allude particularly to the superiority 
assigned them in point of philosophical profundity. The French 
are generally underrated, sometimes even by their OAvn "writers, in 
this respect ; owing, I think, to the character of comprehensiveness, 
of method, of completeness, of rotundity, so to speak, of the national 
intellect. There is an illusory affinity between irregularity and 
magnitude. Of figures containing equal areas, the more regular ap- 
pear the smallest. A circle is smaller to the vulgar eye than a sca- 
lene triangle of scarce three-fourths its dimensions. There is in 
reference to the execution too, perhaps, a confirmative illusion of 
sentiment ; what is gracefully regular, (the circle for example,) sug- 
gests ease ; what is grandly eccentric, (the triangle,) effect. But the 
fact is Tvell knowu to be immeasurably the otjier -way.— (Tr.'s N.) 



O CONNELL. 317 

I should say, in conclusion, that both, in spite of their de- 
fects and their vices, are the expression of a great people, 
and that so long as the English tribune shall rise amid the 
seas in its proud and illustrious island, and so long as the 
French tribune shall remain erect amid the rubbish of aris- 
tocracy and despotism, the liberty of the world is in no dan- 
ger of perishing. 

But it is not the parliamentary orator that I am here to 
draw ; it is not Demosthenes pleading his own cause in the 
oligarchical forum of Athens ; it is not Mirabeau throwing 
off the splendors of his magnificent language in the hall of 
Versailles, before the three orders of clergy, nobility, and 
commons; it is not Burke, Pitt, Fox, Brougham, Canning, 
shivering the glass-work of Whitehall with the thunders of 
their academical eloquence : it is another kind of eloquence, 
an eloquence without name, prodigious, transporting, sponta- 
neous, and the like of which has been never heard by the an- 
cients or the moderns ; it is O'Connell, the great O'Connell, 
erect upon the soil of his country, with the heavens for dome, 
the boundless plain for tribune, a whole people for auditory, 
and for subject that people, incessantly that people, and for 
echo the universal acclamations of the multitude, resembling 
the hollow-toned mutterings of the tempest, or the dashing 
of the billows against the rock-barred beach of the ocean. 

Never, in any age or any country, has any man obtained 
over his nation an empire so sovereign, so absolute, so en- 
tire. Ireland impersonates herself in O'Connell. He is, 
in some sort, -himself alone, her army, her parliament, her 
ambassador, her prince, her liberator, her apostle, her god. 
His ancestors, descendants of the Kings of Ireland, wore at 
their side the falchion of battles. He, a tribune of the peo- 
ple, carries likewise the falchion of other battles, the fal- 
chion of eloquence, more redoubtable than the sword. 

Behold O'Connell with his people, for they are veritably 

his : he lives in their life, he smiles in their joys, he bleeds 

in their wounds, he weeps in their sorrows. He transports 

them from fear to hope, from servitude to liberty, from the 

27* 



318 • OCONNELL. 

fact to the law, from law to duty, from supplication to invec- 
tive, and from anger to mercy and commiseration. He 
orders this whole people to kneel down upon the earth and 
pray, and instantly they kneel and pray ; to lift their eyes 
to heaven, and they lift them ; to execrate their tyrants, and 
they execrate ; to chant hymns to liberty, and they chant 
them ; to sign petitions for the reform of abuses, to unite 
their forces, to forget their feuds, to embrace their brothers, 
to pardon their enemies, and they sign, unite, forget, em- 
brace, pardon ! 

Our Berryer dwells but in the upper regions of politics. 
He breathes but the air of aristocracy. His name has not 
descended into the workshop and the cottage. He has not 
drank of the cup of equality. He has never handled the 
rough implements of the mechanics. He has never inter- 
changed his words with their words. He has never felt 
the grasp of their horny hands. He has never applied his 
heart to their heart, and felt its beatings ! But O'Connell, 
how cordially popular ! how entirely Irish ! What magni- 
ficent stature ! what athletic form ! what vigor of lungs ! 
what expansion of heart in that animated and blooming 
countenance ! what sweetness in those large blue eyes ! 
what joviality ! what inspiration ! what wit-flashings inex- 
haustible ! How nobly he bears his head upon that mus- 
cular neck, his head tossed backward and exhibiting in 
every lineament his proud independence ! 

What renders him incomparable with the orators of his 
own country as well as of ours, is, that without pre-medita- 
tion, and by the sole impetuosity, the mere energy of his 
powerful and victorious nature, he enters body and soul into 
his subject, and appears to be rather possessed by it himself 
than to possess it. His heart runs over, it moves by bounds, 
by plunges, until the spectator can almost reckon its every 
pulsation. 

Like a full-blooded courser suddenly checked upon his 
sinewy and trembling haunches, so O'Connell can stop short 
in the unbridled career of his eloquence, turn sharply round 



319 

and resume it. So much has his genius of presence, of 
elasticity and of vigor ! 

You would think at first that he falters and is going to 
sink beneath the weight of the internal god by whom he is 
agitated. Presently, he recovers himself, a halo around his 
brow and his eye full of flame, and his voice, which has no- 
thing of mortal, begins to reverberate through the air and to 
fill all space. 

How explain, how define that extraordinary genius which 
finds no repose in a body forever in motion, and which is 
equal to the dispatch of a large professional business, civil 
and criminal, to the laborious investigation of the laws, to 
the immense correspondence of the Association, to the agi- 
tation nightly and daily of seven millions of men — that soul 
of fire which heats O'Connell without consuming him — that 
intellect of so incredible an agility, which touches every 
subject without tarnishing it, which never. tires and which 
amplifies itself by all the space it has traversed, which does 
not divide but multiply itself by diffusion, which draws new 
vigor and force from its very exhaustion, v/hich wastes con- 
stantly without the necessity of repairing itself, which sur- 
renders and abandons itself to the impetuosity of passion 
without losing for an instant its self-possession, — that phe- 
nomenon of an old age so green and so vigorous, that puis- 
sant life which has the vitality of several others, that inex- 
haustible efflux of an exceptional nature without parallel 
and without precedent. 

Had O'Connell marched, his claymore in hand, to the en- 
counter of despotism, he would have been crushed beneath 
the forces of the British aristocracy ; but he intrenched and 
fortified himself behind the bulwark of the law as in an 
impregnable fortress. He is bold, but he is perhaps still 
more adroit than bold. He advances, but he retires. He 
will go to the utmost limits of his rights, but not an inch 
beyond. He mails himself in the buckler of chicanery and 
battles upon this ground, foot to foot, by means of captious 
interpretations and a network of subtleties which he casts 



.>« 



320 O'CONNELL. 

around his adversaries, who no more can extricate themselves 
from its entangling meshes. Scholastic, hair-splitting, wily, 
shiftful, a keen attorney, he snatches by trick M^hatever he 
cannot wrest by force. Where others would sink, he saves 
himself. His skill defends him from his impetuosity. 

Meanwhile the specialty of his end does not divert his at- 
tention from the general interests of humanity. He desires 
economy in the public expenditures, because it is the duty 
of every government. He desires freedom of worship, be- 
cause it is the will of the human conscience. He wishes 
the triumph of ideas because it is the only triumph which 
sheds no blood, the only one which rests upon opinion and 
justice, and above all the only one which endures.* 

He is poetical to lyrical sublimity, or familiar to conver- 
sational simplicity. He attracts to him his auditory and 
transports it upon the plafform of the theatre, or at times 
descends himself and mingles with the spectators. He does 
not leave the stage for a moment without action or recitation. 
He distributes to each his part. He seats himself in judg- 
ment. He questions and he condemns. The people ratify, 
lift hands and imagine themselves in a court-house. 

Sometimes O'Connell brings the internal drama of the 
family to subserve the external drama of public affairs. He 
introduces his aged father, his ancestors and the ancestry of 
the people. He expedites his orders ; he commands the 
audience to sit, to stand, or to prostrate itself; he assumes 
the direction of the debates, and the police of the assem- 
blage ; he presides, he reads, he reports, he offers motions, 
petitions, requisitions ; he arranges, he improvisates narra- 
tions, monologues, dialogues, prosopopeias, interludes, plots 

* The allusion is, as the reader perceives, to the celebrated " moral- 
force doctrine" of O'Connell; a doctrine which constitutes his 
strongest title to the general gratitude of posterity. "What it asserts 
is, in principle, the subordination of the physical and brutal to the 
spiritual and rational in human nature. The principle itself may 
have been enunciated long before O'Connell ; but the real benefactor 
in such cases, is he who gives to the barren abstraction an actuality of 
some sort, in popular opinion, if not in political institution. — Tk.'s N. 



O CON\MiLL. ^ 321 

and counterplots. He knows that the Irishman is at once 
mirthful and melanchdy, that he likes at the same time the 
figurative, the brilliant and the sarcastic, and so he breaks 
the laughter by tears, the sublime by the ridiculous. He 
assails in a body the Lords of parliament, and, chasing 
them from their aristocratic covert, he tracks them one by 
one as the hunter does the wild beast. He rallies them un- 
mercifully, abuses them, travesties and delivers them over, 
stuck with horns and ludicrous gibbosities, to the hootings 
and hisses of the crowd. If interpellated by any of the au- 
ditors, he stops, grapples his interrupter, floors him, and re- 
turns briskly to his speech. It is thus that with marvellous 
suppleness, he follows the undulations of that popular sea, 
now agitated and obstreperous beneath the strokes of his tri- 
dent, now ruffled by the breath of the gentle breeze, now 
placid, lucent and golden with the sunbeams, like a bath of 
the luxurious sirens. 

O'Connell is neither Whig, nor Tory, nor Radical in the 
English sense. Accordingly Whigs, Tories and Radicals bear 
him that inveterate hatred and that haughty scorn of a con- 
quering people for the subject of the conquered, of an Eng- 
lishman for the Irishman, of a Protestant for the Catholic. 
But this hatred, this scorn, these insolences cannot daunt 
him. Unlike our orators, so sentimental and so fastidious, 
because they are without conviction, without heart and 
without faith, O'Connell never doubts of the triumph of his 
cause, and even in the House of Commons, looking his ad- 
versaries firmly in the face, he exclaims : 

" I will never be guilty of the crime of despairing of 
my country ; and to-day, after two centuries of suffering, 
here I stand amidst you in this hall, repeating the same 
complaints, demanding the same justice which was claimed 
by our fathers ; but no longer with the humble voice of the 
suppliant, but with the sentiment of our force and the con- 
viction that Ireland will henceforth find means to do, without 
you, what you shall have refused to do for her ! I make no 
compromise with you ; 1 want the same rights for us ^'-at 



322 O'CONNELL. 

you enjoy, the same municipal system for Ireland as for 
England and Scotland : otherwise, what is a union with 
you ? A union upon parchment ! Well, we will tear this 
parchment to pieces, and the Empire will be sundered !" 

This is high-toned, and a man must feel himself almost a 
king to hold such language ! 

Speak not to this man of a different subject. His patriotic 
soul, all capacious as it is, can contain no other. He is not, 
even in London and in the parliament of the three King- 
doms, a member of parliament. He is but an Irishman. He 
has but Ireland, all Ireland in his heart, in his thought, in 
his memory, on his lips, in his ear. 

" I hear," says he, " day after day the plaintive voice of 
Ireland, crying, Am I to be kept forever waiting and for- 
ever suffering ? No, fellow countrymen, you will be left to 
suffer no longer : you will not have in vain asked justice 
from a people of brothers. England is no longer that coun- 
try of prejudices where the mere name of popery excited 
every breast and impelled to iniquitous cruelties. The rep- 
resentatives of Ireland have carried the Reform bill, which 
has enlarged the franchises of the English people ; they 
will be heard with favor in asking their colleagues to render 
justice to Ireland. But should it prove otherwise, should 
parliament still continue deaf to our prayer, then we will 
appeal to the English nation, and if the nation too should 
suffer itself to be blinded by its prejudices, we will enter the 
fastnesses of our mountains and take counsel but of our 
energy, our courage and our despair." 

It is impossible to invoke in terms more forcible and 
touching the reason, the conscience and the gratitude of the 
English people, and to mingle more artfully supplication 
with menace, than in this beautiful passage. 

But you feel that this gigantic orator is straitened, is sti- 
fled under this cupola of the English Parliament, like a huge 
vegetable under a bell-glass. That his breast may distend j 
his stature tower and his voice' thunder, he must have the 
air, the sun and the soil of Ireland. It is only on touching 



O CONNELL. 323 

that sacred land, that land of his country, that he respires 
and unfolds himself. It is but there, in presence of his peo- 
pie, that his revolutionary eloquence, his defying eloquence, 
launches aloft, unbinds^ and radiates its thousand splendors 
like the immense sheaves of a fire- work. It is but then that 
he pours out the boiling torrents of that prodigious irony 
which avenges the slave and desolates the tyrant ! 

Not that his raillery is keen ; it does not pierce like a 
needle. Like the ancient sacrificer, he lifts his axe, he 
strikes the victim between the two horns, just in the middle 
of the forehead : the animal emits a long groan and drops. 

He should be seen mustering his indignation and his en- 
ergies, when he recounts the long history of his country's 
misfortunes, her oppressions, her woes; when he wakes 
from the tombs, those generous heroes, those unswerving 
citizens, who have ensanguined with their blood the scaf- 
folds of Ireland, its plains and its lakes ; when he is ex- 
hibiting to his brave adherents the lamentable spectacle of 
their liberty lacerated by the sword of England ; the soil of 
Iheir fathers in the hands of those tyrants, the government 
instituted by them and for them, for them alone ; the tribu- 
nals of justice crammed with their creatures ; the parlia- 
ments sold, the laws written in blood, the soldiers turned 
into executioners, the prisons full ; the peasantry ground by 
taxation, brutalized by ignorance, emaciated by sickness and 
famine, haggard, bowed to the earth, and extended on a 
litter of fetid straw ; the hovels hard by the palaces ; the 
insolence of the aristocracy ; idleness without charge and 
without pity ; labor without remuneration and without re- 
spite ; martial law re-established ; habeas corpus suspended ; 
the administration overrun with strangers ; nationality pro- 
scribed ; religion incapacitating for either judges, or juries, 
or witnesses, or landholders, or school-teachers, or even con- 
stables, under penalty of radical nullity and even capital 
punishment ; the Catholic churches empty, bare, without or- 
naments ; their priests beggars, wanderers, outlaws : the An- 
glican church, the while, with joyous brow and heart, hav- 



324 



O C O N N E L L . 



ing her hands stuck deep in her sacks and coffers of gold. 
Then roll down the tears from every eye, amid a solemn and 
fearful silence, and that whole people, overwlielmed, heart- 
broken with its sobbings, revolves in«its heavhig bosom the 
direful day of vengeance. 

Meanwhile let England, from the elevation of her palaces, 
and upon her beds of purple and down, give trembling ear 
to the meanings of that Enceladus who mutters beneath the 
mountain which holds him imprisoned. He traverses its 
subterranean recesses, he mounts upon his legs, he upheaves 
with his back the kindling furnaces of democracy ; and in 
the terror of an approaching eruption, England is stricken 
with dismay, the fiery flood is already upon her feet, and 
she retires precipitately lest the volcano burst and blow her 
into the air. 

What cares this turbulent orator, this savage child of the 
mountains, for Aristotle and rhetoric, for drawing-room po- 
liteness, for the proprieties of grammar, or the urbanity of 
language ! He is the people, he speaks like the people. 
He has the same prejudices, the same religion, the same pas- 
sions, the same thought, the same heart, a heart that beats 
through every pulse for his beloved Ireland, a heart that hates 
with all its energies the tyrannical Albion. See you not 
how he penetrates, how he merges himself into the very vitals 
of his cherished countrymen, in order to feel and to palpitate, 
as they palpitate and feel. How he puts himself in their 
shackles, how he binds around him the irons of their servi- 
tude, that he may the better blush with them for their bond- 
age, and the better burst its chain. How he plunges into 
the glories of their by-gone days ! Then, leads them back 
to their living sores, their desolation, their political helotism, 
their social misery, their destitution, their degradation ! How 
he reanimates again, how he refreshes them with the relig- 
ious breathings of his hopes ! How he cheers them with the 
proud accents of liberty and overwhelms them so effectually 
with his voice, his exclamations, his denunciations, his soul, 
his arms and his whole body, that at the end of the discourse, 



325 

this orator and this entire audience of fifty thousand men 
have but one body, one soul, one cry of — " Old Ireland for- 
ever !" 

Yes, it is Ireland, his best-beloved Ireland that he has set 
as upon an altar, in the centre of all his hopes, of all his 
affections. He sees but her, he hears but her, in Parlia- 
ment, in church, at the bar, at the domestic fireside, in the 
club-room, at the banquet-table, amid his triumphal orations, 
absent, present, in all places, at all times ! He reverts to 
her-unceasingly by a thousand avenues, routes bordered with 
abysses and precipices, lofty mountains and lovely lakes, 
and fertile plains and winding meadows. Yes, thou it is, 
green Erin, emerald of the seas, whose cincture he unbinds 
upon the sands of the beach. Thou who appearest to him 
seated on the spiral summit of the temples of Catholicism, 
thou whom he hears in the murmu rings of the storm, thou 
whom he respires in the perfumed breeze of the zephyrs ! 
Thou whom anon he imagines drawing against the Saxon 
thy formidable claymore, to the sound of the thunder of bat- 
tles ! Thou whom he prefers, poor beggar though thou art, 
with thy rags, thy shrivelled body, and thy straw-covered 
hovels, to the glittering palaces of aristocracy, to insolent 
England, to the queen of the ocean ! Thou of whom he 
contemplates, with respectful pity, the languishing graces 
and the hollow and faded cheeks, because thou art the tomb 
of his ancestors, the cradle of his sons, the glory of his life, 
the immortality of his name, the palm-tree blossomed with 
his eloquence, because thou lovest thy children and lovest 
him, the greatest of them ; because thou sufferest for them, 
for him, because thou art Ireland, because thou art his 
country ! 

Our French parliamentary speakers do not succeed in 
drawing a single vote in the wake of their orations. They 
have witnessed so many revolutions, served so many gov- 
ernments, subverted so many ministries, that they have 
ceased to put faith in either liberty or power. They are 
neither Saintsimonians, nor Christians, nor Turks, nor Ana- 



326 O'CONNELL. 

baptists, nor Vaudois, nor Albigenses, they believe in no re- 
ligion, absolutely none. But for O'Connell, he has a firm 
faith in the wondrous prestiges of his art; he believes un- 
doubtingly in the future emancipation of Ireland. He be- 
lieves in the God of the Christians, and it is because he be- 
lieves, because he hopes, that this eagle sustains his flight sub- 
lime in the upper regions of eloquence, upon pinions already 
frozen with the ice of so many winters. He never sepa- 
rates the triumph of religion from the triumph of liberty ! 
He thrills with delight, he is transported, rapt in his magnifi- 
cent visions of the future, and his inspired words have some- 
thing of the grandeur of the firmament which over-canopies 
him, of the air and space which surround him, and of the 
popular waves which pour along in his footsteps, when he 
exclaims after the Clare election : 

" In presence of my God, and with the most profound sen- 
timent of the responsibility attached to the solemn and aw- 
ful duties which you have twice imposed upon me, fellow- 
countrymen, I accept them ! and I find the assurance of 
duly discharging them, not in myself, but in you. The men 
of Clare well know that the only basis of liberty is religion. 
They have triumphed, because the voice which was raised 
for the country, had first been breathed in prayer to the 
Lord. Now, hymns of liberty are heard throughout the 
land ; they play around the hills, they fill the vales, they 
murmur in our streams, and the torrents with voice of thun- 
der re-echo back to the mountains : ' Ireland is free !' " 



BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 



MIRABEAU. 

HoNORE Gabriel Riquetti, Compte de Mirabeau, was 
born at Bignon, near Nemours, on the 9th of March, 1749. 
His father, Victor Riquetti, was a French marquis of an an- 
cient and honorable house, which counted among the sup- 
porters of its line, many characters of remarkable valor 
and wisdom. The family name, Riquetti, or Arrighetti, 
was of " Florentine origin. In 1267 and 1268, during 
one of those revolutions, to which the constant struggles 
between the Empire and the Papacy gave rise, the family of 
the Arrighetti, conspicuous in the party of the Gibellines, 
were driven from Florence. The act of proscription men- 
tions the names of nine individuals of this family, and among 
others, Azzucius Arrighetti, Filiiis Goerardi, et omnes mas- 
culi descendentes ex eis." This Azzucius retired, upon his 
banishment, into Provence,* and the filiation continued from 
him, in a direct line, down to the subject of the present 
notice. " The Arrighetti appeared in Provence, with the 
rank and spirit of the high nobles of those days. They 
carefully preserved the pre-eminence of their order, pur- 
chased fiefs, held military commissions, founded hospitals, 
and endowed religious houses. Their motto was " Juvat 
Pietas:' 

" Ever since I can remember," says Mirabeau, in his 
Life of his grandfather, John Antony, Marquis of Mira- 
beau, '• I have seen my father and uncle celebrate and 

* Country of the Rhone River, South-eastern wine country of 
France. 



328 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

honor the memory of our ancestorsj several of whom were 
illustrious, not through courtly favor, or the wages of servil- 
ity, but by manly virtues, and services rendered to their 
country, the true and only source of real fame."* 

The history of this family is a proof against all hypothe- 
ses, that virtues may be transmitted by inheritance ; and 
that by judicious marriages, and the maintaining a proper 
pride of ancestry, an illustrious house may perpetuate it- 
self through every vicissitude of fortune. 

It is remarkable that, during a period of nearly six hun- 
dred years, but one of this family entered holy orders ; and 
even this one against his proper nature and inclination. 
The vocation of the race was at first commerce, then war, 
and finally literature, and politics ; none of them attained 
to great commands in the army, more through want of 
certain courtier-like qualities, than of those of a great com- 
mander. 

Peter, the son of the first who arrived from Florence, 
settled in the confines of France, on the summit of a moun- 
tain, in Seyne, a border town amOng the Alps. He founded 
a hospital immediately on his arrival ; and in the course of 
the following centuries, various other religious houses were 
founded by his descendants. Peter married Sibilla of Fos, 
whose beauty and accomplishments were celebrated by the 
Troubadours; a fact which shows the great estimation in 
which the family were held. 

Honorius, the first of that name, settled in Marseilles, 
where the Riquetti engaged in commerce. " Those days," 
continues Mirabeau, " did not resemble the periods when 
power and the curb of obedience being concentrated in the 
sovereign authority, a few metropolitan cities, from the in- 
creased means of communication, and the great influx of 
precious metals from the mines of the new world, reduced 
every other city to the rank and denomination of second- 
rate towns. In those days a republican spirit pervaded 
every town, more especially the prosperous commercial 
* See Memoirs of Mirabeau. 



M I R A B E A U . 829 

cities." Marseilles, the principal entrepot of the Medi- 
terranean commerce, though subject to the monarchy, re- 
tained its republican privileges. " Trade," says Mirabeau, 
*' which assumes the name of commerce in maritime towns, 
is naturally inclined towards republicanism. The lodge," 
the exchange, the bank — all those different assemblies of 
merchants, form a kind of democratic senate." In such cir- 
cumstances, the energy of the Riquettis did not fail to seize 
upon the true means of popularity and influence. They 
offered themselves for public offices, and were soon the 
leading family in the city. They engaged in commerce, 
and accumulated great wealth. A certain bishop having, 
in a public document, named John de Riquetti, " a trader 
of Marseilles," as though despising his occupation, John 
replied : " With regard to the title of trader of Marseilles, 
which would be derogatory to no one, since our kings have 
even invited nobles to become participators in the commerce 
of this city, I am, or was a police merchant, in the same 
manner that the bishop is a vender of holy water. It will 
be remembered, that I was first consul of Marseilles, in 
1562 ; and every one knows, that to fill this office, a man 
must be of noble lineage." It must not be forgotten that, 
though John de Riquetti was a stanch Catholic, the re- 
spect for popes and bishops was not strong in Provence ; 
and these were the times of the Reformation, when, if it 
had not been for Spanish bigotry, and the power of the Em- 
pire, the cities of Europe would have thrown off Catholicism 
at once, and together. In a history of Provence, the Sieur 
de Mirabeau, " enjoying an honorable rank in Marseilles," 
is named " one of the richest merchants in the city." 

This family, under their leader, John de Riquetti, ren- 
dered Marseilles to Henry IV., when he became King of 
France. " Thus," says Mirabeau, commenting on the 
troubled life of his ancestor, " a long existence, however 
eventful, always brings consolation to virtue. Times of 
discord and anarchy have one advantage among a thousand 
evils : men arc formed and put to the tost ; numerous 

OK* 



330 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

families oecome a positive good, if it be only as rallying- 
points ; the turbulent activity of youth finds useful employ- 
ment ; and old age is revered, consulted, believed, and 
obeyed." And in another place he observes: " We cannot 
suppose that any one will question the fact, that in all coun- 
tries, and at all times, there live and die, remote from the 
bustle of public affairs, a number of men very superior to 
those who play a part on the world's stage, though often 
the mark of public scorn." 

Nothing is more remarkable in the history of this family, 
than their adherence and unanimity. It is said of Hono- 
rius, who died in 1622, that he was the ^'only one of the 
family, after whose death an inventory was found : a proof 
of the praiseworthy union, which cemented their domestic 
confidence." — Mirabeau. 

Of the third Honorius, a person of extraordinary charac- 
ter, who, upon the death of his father, in 1672, became the 
chief of the house, and whose economy was the means of 
saving it from ruin, " was called, for his wisdom, the Sol- 
omon of the country." He was also a soldier, and a man 
of vast personal authority. He intended to have written a 
history of his domestic troubles at Marseilles. '• A history 
of this description, written by the wisest man of his time, 
(for such was his reputation,) a man whose only books, after 
those of Holy Writ,* were Thucydides, Tacitus, Machiavel, 
and some other historians — a man also of weight and au- 
thority, entirely broken into public business, would no 
doubt have been extremely valuable, notwithstanding the 
apparently small importance of the subject, when compared 
with that of other histories." — Ibid. 

Of the spirit of some of the women of these times, some 
estimate may be formed, by the following anecdote of Anne 
of Ponteves de Bous, the wife of a Riquetti. Being one 
day outrageously insulted by the Chevalier de Griasque, a 
well-known bully, " Scoundrel !" she exclaimed, placing 

* The Bible was a Catholic, as well as Protestant book, in those 
days ! 



MIRABEAU. 331 

the muzzle of a pistol to his head, " I would blow your 
brains out, but that I have children who will avenge me in 
a more honorable manner." Accordingly, her son Francis, 
then not seventeen years of age, hastened home from Malta, 
and instantly challenged and killed the bully. 

Bruno de Riquetti, another son of this spirited house, was 
the companion of Louis XIV., in his youth. He would 
never flatter the young king, by being intentionally inferior 
to him in athletic sports. His temper, like that of the rest 
of this family, was that of a madman ; nor did his property 
restrain it. A great number of anecdotes show him to 
have been a man of the most brilliant character. 

But it is chiefly on the character of his grandfather, 
John Antony Riquetti, that Mirabeau takes a pleasure in 
dwelling. " His reputation, (as a soldier, he had not his 
equal in the grand army of Louis XIV., if not for the wis- 
dom, yet for the more brilliant qualities of a commander,) his 
services, his commanding figure, his rapid eloquence, his 
haughty demeanor, his virtues, and even his defects, in- 
spired all around him with a certain awe. In spite of the 
urbanity of his manner, his quick and touchy temper made 
him feared. It was impossible to become familiar with 
him. Even his children dared not, in his presence, yield 
to the impulse of filial affection." — Miraieau. 

The memoirs of this truly heroical, if not truly great 
character, forms one of the completest military portraits in 
existence. 

Through a lack of those qualities which are necessary 
to favor at court, this formidable soldier and complete gen- 
tleman never rose above the rank of colonel in the French 
army, though his services placed him on an equal footing 
with the best commanders of his time. He possessed every 
quality that insures respect, united with a desperate valor, 
and a great love of authority. No man was better known, 
or had more personal regard in his time. It was impossible 
for his inferiors in age or position, not to obey him. 

The sons of John Antony inherited his intelligence and 



BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

urbanity, together with his temper and imaginative quali- 
ties. The first was the chevalier, afterwards Bailli of Mi- 
rabeau, (born 17X7,) a very witty and sensible man, well- 
informed, virtuous, kind, and feeling ; but austere, pro- 
foundly religious, proud, and of an inflexible firmness. The 
Marchioness of Pompadour, having remarked to him, in a 
conversation of the most courtly and elegant kind, which he 
knew well how to support, that it was a pity the Mirabeaus 
were all such hot-brained men ; the chevalier, who was 
at that time a naval officer of great distinction, immediately 
resumed all the roughness of the sailor, and retorted, says 
Mirabeau, in these remarkable words : — " It is true, madam, 
that such is the title of legitimacy in our house ; but wise 
and cool brains have been guilty of so many follies, and 
have ruined so many kingdoms, that it would not be, per- 
haps, very imprudent to make trial of hot brains. At all 
events, they certainly could not do worse." 

The life of a courtier inspired him with an aversion 
half feudal, half republican, which amounted almost to a 
mania ; and after rendering important services in the navy, 
and in those distant employments to which the able tactics 
of men in power wished to confine him, and which, fa- 
tiguing and unproductive as they were, (he was at one time 
governor of Guadaloupe,) ruined his health without increas- 
ing his fortune ; he retired from public service, and soon 
after became bailli, or chief-judge of Mirabeau. In his re- 
tirement he devoted himself to letters, and had a library of 
six thousand volumes. His life was passed in acts of pri- 
vate beneficence and public benefit. Being a knight of 
Malta, it was proposed at one time to raise him to the pres- 
idency, or grand-mastership, but he declined the honor. 

Victor, the eldest of the three sons of John Antony, and 
who inherited the title of marquis, was born at Perthuis in 
Provence, on the 15th of October, 1715. He became a 
knight of Malta, like many of his ancestors, at an early 
age. At the age of fourteen he entered the army as en- 
sign — soon after became captain of grenadiers, in the regi- 



M r R A B E A U . ' 333 

ment of Duras. He distinoruished himself in several sieves 
— made the campaign of Bavaria in 1742, and received the 
cross of St. Louis in 1743. 

At the age of twenty-one he became the head of the 
family ; and having no taste for a military life, retired 
upon his estates, where he devoted himself to the study of 
political economy, and to general literature. Soon after, 
wishing to put himself at the head of the new sect of politi- 
cal economists, he removed to Paris with his family. He 
had, in 1743, married Mary Genevieve of Vassau, a lady 
more recommendable by advantages of birth and fortune, 
than by beauty of* person. This was the mother of the fa- 
mous Mirabeau. The literary and didactic inclinations of 
Victor, made their appearance in great strength, at a very 
early age. Before two and twenty he had written volumes on 
political economy, and even traced out for his children, that 
were to be, " plans, injunctions, and instructions," as curious 
for the same dogmatical spirit, which he displayed all his life 
after, as for the bombast and singularity of the style in which 
they were enunciated. His familiar letters, on the contrary, 
were remarkable for copiousness and ease of expression. 

He had also -a passion for bad bargains in estates, by 
which he greatly impaired his fortune. 

For fifteen years he lived peaceably with his wife, who 
brought him eleven children. In 1760 the growth of a new 
affection for another woman, who came to reside at Bignon, 
where he had lived since his marriage, put an end to the 
fair hopes of his family. The despotic character of Victor 
appeared in all the relations of life. He seems to have 
both imitated and inherited from his father, a vehement 
haughtiness and obstinacy ; which, assisted by a wrong-head- 
edness peculiarly his own, and an imagination inflated by 
political and metaphysical speculations, placed Mm com- 
pletely beyond reach of advice or melioration. In his fam- 
ily he became an odious despot — in his relation to the world, 
a pompous dogmatist, and a very ambitious fanatic. His 
love of power seems to have been intense, and his abuse of 



334 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

it a matter of certainty ; not from any principle of dishon- 
esty, for from that his great pride prevented him, but from 
a secret delight in the pre-eminence of his own conceptions. 

His influence as a political writer was considerable, and 
for one treatise, his Theorie de I'lmpot, the government 
saw fit to consider him dangerous, and even worthy of a 
few days' imprisonment. In the number of his adherents 
were many illustrious persons, — the Margrave of Baden ; 
Leopold of Tuscany ; the King of Poland ; Gustavus III., 
King of Sweden, and others, of the higher ranks. It was 
even said that the Dauphin, son of Louis XV., out of af- 
fection for a work of his, called the *' Friend of Man," 
termed it " the breviary of honest men." 

His literary habits were singularly exact. " I have al- 
ways kept a memorandum of everything," he writes to his 
brother the bailli, between whom and himself there passed 
a correspondence of several thousand letters, " and given 
an account of everything. At twenty I spoke and wrote 
already to those who will succeed me." He left at his 
death, exclusive of completed works, more than four hun- 
dred folio volumes of copied correspondence, memoranda, &c. 

He embraced the theories of Dr. Quesnay, who was his 
contemporary. This economist founded the physiocratic 
school, which tau'ght that the agricultural is the only produ- 
cing class, and that all others are unproductive ; that 
trade should be free, and all power founded in landed pos- 
session ; a principle essentially feudal and aristocratic, and 
therefore agreeable to a Mirabeau. The marquis even be- 
came the successor of Quesnay, and led the sect. " My 
principles," he wrote, in answer to a proposition from the 
Dauphin, to make him under-tutor to his sons, " are, that 
in public affairs, determination is necessary. Aut Ccesar, 
aut nihiV — an answer which agrees perfectly with every 
action of his life. In all things he showed the despot. 

" The Marquis of Mirabeau," says his biographer, " ac- 
customed himself early to place upon those under his con- 
trol, the heavy yoke of marital and paternal despotism ; — 



M I R A B E A U . 335 

the yoke of the husband, as he had seen it borne by his 
mother, whom he idolized •* the paternal yoke, for never 
was son more submissive ; and even at the age of fifty-four, 
did this haughty man kneel every evening, and bow his 
head, to receive his mother's blessing. As a nobleman, af- 
fable ; as a husband, imperious ; popular and obliging 
among his tenantry ; formal and haughty with his family ; 
naturally gay, and yet almost always in his family circle 
wearing a covering of stern and gloomy moroseness ; pos- 
sessing sensibility, and yet striving at all times to disguise 
the feelings of his heart ; sincerely religious, but without 
humility, without indulgence, and never forgiving; dis- 
daining persuasion, and irritated by resistance ; sincerely a 
philanthropist in speculative theory, but hard-hearted and 
inflexible in the practice of domestic discipline ; an ardent 
apostle of legality, yet governing his family by imprisoning 
his refractory children :" an unfaithful husband, a jealous 
and terrible parent, " economical, and even penurious, in 
regard to himself and others ; and adopting all possible 
order in dissipating his fortune in adventurous undertak- 
ings ; wise, yet committing errors without number, through 
excessive confidence in theory ; — he suffered much, and 
made others suffer with him ; he had little of serenity, less 
of joy ; and he precipitated his nearest of kin into count- 
less misfortunes, and what is worse, into faults which have 
been represented as crimes." Such was the father of Mi- 
rabeau ; and a knowledge of the character of the father is 
absolutely necessary to an understanding of that of the son. 
He is reported to have hated his son for the apparent 
freedom of character which he saw in him.* Accustomed, 
himself, to submit to the paternal will, he required, but 
could not exact the same, in his own children : — with great 
pride, he had not a strong will ; and sought to govern 
by terror, rather than justice. " All my misfortunes," 
says Mirabeau, " derive their origin from having offended 

* One of the most admirable vromen of her time, for qualities 
proper to her sex, and the reverse of those of her husband and son. 



336 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

my father, to whom, ten years shice, with the ingenuousness 
and imprudence of youth, I uttered those touching, and too 
keenly-felt words, which, to my misfortune, he will never 
forget : Alas ! sir, if you had only self-love, would not my 
success belong to you ?"* " Fet," says the partial biog- 
rapher, "the marquis felt neither hatred nor jealousy for his 
son, though he persecuted him from childhood to manhood, 
with the (apparent !) rancor of a mortal enemy. "f Yet Mi- 
rabeau himself says of him, " My father is as much my supe- 
rior in genius as he is in age, and by being my parent." 
The marquis seems to have striven all his life to attain the 
pitch of authority which he felt in his father, John Antony, 
whose superior nature and military education gave him a 
great advantage ;— but for severity and justice, he would 
find nothing in his own nature but tyranny and self-opinion- 
ated pride. The slightest hesitation, the least doubt of him- 
self, could never reach his mind; his impressions, his 
opinions, his convictions, his duties, such as he conceived 
them — his conscience, " which he exaggerated and dis- 
placed," had, in his eyes, an authority to which everything 
must yield. He showed himself a blind fanatic — a slave, 
who would be a Brutus. 

His quarrel with his wife, who seems to have wanted 
art, and to have been of a temper not less unforgiving and 
passionate than her husband, threw the greater number of 
their children into a career of life attended with unlimited 
danger, disorder, wanderings, and misfortunes. Acts of 
odious despotism on his part, under the influence of another 
woman, whose youth and beauty gave her a superior in- 
fluence, were all the answers to the vehement, but just com- 
plaints of his wife. " Her rage knew no bounds ; a furious 
enmity, and a scandalous lawsuit were the consequences, 
during fifteen years afterwards; which poisoned the re- 
mainder of their lives, broke up a highly respectable family, 
and rendered their children in a manner orphans. " Ga- 
briel Honore, since so celebrated, under the name of the 

=* Memoirs of Mirabeau, Vol. I. p. 235. t Ibid. 



M I R A B E A U . 337 

Count of Mirabeau, was the fifth child of the marquis, and 
was born on the 9th of March, 1749, at Bignon. The 
period of gestation was alarming, and during delivery, the 
size of the child's head placed the mother in extreme dan- 
ger. Destined to be the most turbulent and active of 
youths, as well as the most eloquent of men, Gabriel was 
born with one foot twisted, and his tongue tied ; in addition 
to which his strength and size were extraordinary, and 
already were Uvo teeth formed in his jaw." 

" His father had observed certain Shandean precautions, 
recommended by his friend, the Duke of Nivernois, to 
whose advice he attributed more than was due."* 

The aristocratic importance of the marquis on his estate, 
is apparent from the following extract from a letter, to the 
above-named nobleman, on this event. " You know now 
that I have a son who owes his existence to you," — in a 
Shandean sense, of course. " This has given me an oppor- 
tunity of knowing, that to do good, or at least to seem to do 
so, attracts a kindly regard. I am pretty charitable in 
word and deed, and I employ all the poor who offer them- 
selves. My wife is so, likewise ; she dresses, with constitu- 
tional heroism, the m.ost hideous ulcers, has various recipes, 
and gives five sous to each of those whose sores she has 
dressed. These trifles succeed : And being stopped by a 
sort of superstition, as there was a village festival on the 
birth of my first child, I intended to have forbidden all 
village rejoicings. But the country people from the 
neighboring parishes were assembled, and testified a joy 
which I did not expect from them; saying, that if he 
resembled his father, they should not, for a long time to 
come, eat acorns, as their neighbors of Egreville had done" 
— (through bad management of the estate ?) — " the year be- 
fore." Again, from a letter dated in 1763 : " I have nothing 
to say about my enormous son, only that he beats his nurse, 
who does not fail to return it, and they try which shall 
strike hardest." Again: "The hale and robust *farrier's 
* Memoirs of Mirabeau, p. 240. 
29 



338 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

wife, of whom you speak, is the same that nursed my son. 
She is a mistress woman, who has well brought up two 
coveys of children. She kept a forge, though a widow ; 
for having had two husbands, and finding that they did not 
last, she refused to take a third. She has paid her husband's 
debts, and brought up her sons, who have married in obedi- 
ence to her wishes. She has reared flocks of geese that 
would do the Prussian exercise, and turkeys capable of 
passing a decree on inoculation, — all the while striking 
upon the anvil, as a pastime, under the impression, as she 
says, ' that it lengthens the arms.' This is much better 
than winnowing oats, as Dulcinea did at the audience she 
gave the ambassador, Sancho."* 

When three years old, Gabriel had the confluent small- 
pox. A hasty application upon the tumefied face of some 
injudicious prescription, caused the boy's countenance to be 
deeply furrowed and scarred. The marquis wrote some time 
after to the Bailli : — " Your nephew is as ugly as the nephew 
of Satan." As all the other children were gifted with re- 
markable beauty, this accident may have been the cause of 
a secret aversion in the parent ; it certainly had a great efiect 
on others. 

His private tutor, Poisson, an intelligent and meritorious 
person, took every pains to develop his mind, which showed 
early the signs of great power. From his fourth year, Ga- 
briel was curious, inquisitive, and fond of reading. He 
possessed himself of all papers that came in his way. 

His uncle, then the Chevalier Mirabeau, and Governor of 
Gaudaloupe, discovered from the first great interest in him ; 
inquires about him, in his constant correspondence with the 
marquis, and afterwards used a great influence in the for- 
mation of the young man's character. He seems to have 
regarded him as the true representative of the family. In 
Paris, (1754,) the father writes to the uncle : " Your 
nephew is fat and strong. He is not forgotten, and his 
education is excellent ; for that is the only thing to prevent 
* Memoirs of Mirabeau. p. 241. 



MIR AB E AU. 339 

the smoke of the heart from drifting in a wrong direction. 
All Paris talks of his precocity ; nevertheless, as he is your 
child, as well as mine, I must tell you that his acquire- 
ments are not very extensive at present. He has little 
vices, except mechanical inequality, if it were permitted to 
break forth. He has not much sensitiveness, and is as 
porous* as a bed of sand ; but he is only five years old." 
And again : " May he (Poisson) make him an honest man, 
and a courageous citizen. This is all that is necessary. 
With these qualities he will make that race of pigmies 
tremble before him, who play the great men at court. I 
repeat, with sincerity, the prayer which Joad made on be- 
half of Eliakim. May God hear my prayer !" 

At- the age of seven he was confirmed by the cardinal. 
" It was at the grand supper which succeeded this ceremony, 
that he made the singular distinction related by himself. 
' They explained to me that God could not make contra- 
dictions : for instance, a stick that had but one end. I in- 
quired whether a miracle was not a stick which had but 
one end. My grandmother never forgave me.* " 

The boy became in after time almost ungovernable, and 
was subjected to perpetual chastisement. His precocity of 
mind, and even of body, was a cause of perpetual anxiety 
and trouble. His father, who really doated on him at this 
age, describes him humorously thus : " This child, though 
turbulent, is mild and easily controlled, but of a temper 
tending to indolence. As he does not ill-resemble Punch, 
being all belly and posterior, he appears to me very well 
qualified for the manoeuvres of the tortoise : he presents his 
shell, and allows you to strike." 

In reply to his mother, who reproached him with talking 
too much, he answered, " Mamma, I think the mind is like 
the hand ; be it handsome or ugly, it is made for use, and 
not for show." But this, and other anecdotes, show only 
the apt disposition of his mind, which easily took impressions 

* I. e. Great memory. 



340 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

and sentences from others ; the same belongs to him in af- 
ter-life, for he was a notorious plagiarist. 

Traits of generosity and honor were more original with 
him ; though for these a great deal must be attributed to 
instruction. The age was sentimental, the tradition of no- 
bleness was in his family, and belonged to him of right. 

His father's aversion for him began to appear 'about his 
twelfth year, and strengthened with his growth. The mar- 
quis writes thus : " He has an elevated mind, under the frock 
of a babe. This shows a strange instinct of pride. Noble, 
nevertheless ; it is an embryo of a bloated bully, who will 
eat every man alive before he is twelve years old." 

The whole of the extraordinary anecdotes related of this 
unpaternal jealousy, show it to have originated in a fear of 
the parent, lest the son should prove too powerful a nature 
for himself to control ; a fear sufficient, and more than suf- 
ficient, to have caused the long animosity and separation 
which ensued. The old eagle feared the young one's beak, 
and would fain drive it from the nest. Yet, there seems to 
have been no malice nor ferocity in the boy, only a natural 
disrespect for authority ; the more painful, as it was united 
with a mature generosity and courage, and a precocious dis- 
position to animal vices. 

" He is a type," writes the father, " deeply stamped in 
meanness and absolute baseness, and of that rough and 
dirty character of the caterpillar, which cannot be rubbed 
off." Again : " He possesses intelligence, a memory, and a 
capacity, which strikes, amazes, and terrifies." Again : 
" He is a nothing set off with trifles, which will excite the 
admiration of silly gossips, but will never be but the fourth 
part of a man, if, perchance, he becomes anything." Fur- 
ther, he says, v/riting to the Bailli : " I see that the contin- 
uation of your kindness towards your nephew, has reference 
to the talents and capacity in which you know he is not de- 
ficient ; but I know, from the physical cut of such charac- 
ters, that you must give it up whether you will or not. 
They are always known by their brutal appetites, which 



MIRABEAU. 341 

emanate from themselves. Indulgence in such appetites 
leads to excess, which is gross intemperance ; and, as self- 
love, which abandons no one, even upon the wheel, becomes 
cowardly with cowards, vain with the vain, ferocious with 
the ferocious, their ambition is to surpass swine. There are 
dregs in every race."* 

Finding it impossible to govern his son at home, the mar- 
quis sent him to a military school at Paris, where he was 
subjected to a severe discipline, under the care of a judi- 
cious master, who subdued his temper, and so far excited 
his ambition, that he began soon to learn with great rapid- 
ity ; and excelled all otliers of his age. His memory, al- 
ways powerful, became stored with a prodigious variety of 
knowledge. He mastered the Greek and Latin tongues, 
became familar with English, Italian, German, and Span- 
ish, with which he had been early acquainted in some de- 
gree; applied passionately to mathematics, music, and 
drawing ; with all of which he became thoroughly ac 
quainted. Manly exercises were equally to his taste ; and 
in riding, dancing, fencing, and other exercises, he distin- 
guished himself above his equals in age. 

His mother, who loved him, supplied him secretly with 
money; a measure, whose discovery greatly widened the 
breach between herself and her husband. Gabriel was 
consequently cut off from all correspondence with his 
mother ; a deprivation by no means favorable to the soften- 
ing of his disposition. 

His father, meanwhile, through the malevolent sugges- 
lions of Madame de Pailly, and others, became a prey to 
gloomy suspicions, and seemed more and more estranged 
from his son. He placed him in the army to get him as far 
as possible out of sight. His feelings were certainly mono- 
maniacal, for he looked upon his boy as the curse of his 
life, notwithstanding his great promise. In 1767, Gabriel 
joined the army, and behaved well in his new situation ; but 
did not fail of losing some money at play, and otherwise ex- 
* Memoirs of Mirabeau.— Vol. I. p. 256, 
29* 



842 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

citing the anger of his father — who now conceived a new 
species of hatred against him, as promising to be a spend- 
thrift. He threatens him with imprisonment, calls him, in 
a letter to the bailli, a " scoundrel," and intimates that he 
has no more affection for him left. A love affair, foolish 
enough, but not without danger, caused him to quit his 
regiment, and go to Paris ; for which his father had him 
imprisoned by a letire de cachet — a customary remedy 
granted by the king to noblemen, for the government of 
their refractory sons. He was then but eighteen years of 
age, full of honor, of courage, of sentiment, and even 
of deference for the father, who feared, and therefore, liated 
him. This was the beginning of a series, of which our 
limits forbid the detail, of groundless persecutions, charges, 
recriminations, ending in the final extinction of all affection 
between the child and parent. Gabriel was repeatedly im- 
prisoned, involved in law-suits, reduced to beggary ; and 
finally, at the age of thirty, thrown upon the world, to live 
by literary labor, and at last, to become the leader and first 
spirit of the Revolution. His quarrels gave him the art of 
self command, his recriminations and defences made him an 
orator, his solitary wretchedness taught him to sjanpathize 
with human misery, his compulsory independence, to be 
fearless of all obstacles and of the future. 

Nor was his life without fault. On the contrary, with 
the manly virtues, the pride, courage, generosity, and am- 
bition of his family, he inherited, and did not fail constantly 
to discover, their habitual neglect of social morality, and 
of common prudence. His habits, excepting in the article 
of wine, were habitually loose and intemperate. He was 
even a lover of obscenity, and delighted in the description, if 
not in the practice, of the basest vices. How much of this 
is to be attributed to education, and how much to nature 
and circumstances, it is impossible to decide. Enough, 
that the Revolution found him, with all his faults, a fit head 
and master. 

" At this period," says his biographer, " Mirabeau's frank- 



M 1 R A B E A U . 343 

ness and generosity, rather than any superiority of mind, 
gave him an influence over all who were near him ; and, 
perhaps, no man carried it to a greater extent. The most 
grievous injustice, which youth feels so strongly and re- 
pulses with so much vigor, did not spoil his excellent tem- 
per : he was easily appeased — a single demonstration 
could move, a word affect him." 

Being with the army at Corsica, he wrote an account of 
that brave people, probably descendants of the ancient 
Spartans, and of whom a Roman general said, " they were 
incorriorible, not fit even to be slaves." The Genoese had 
overrun their island, and committed great havoc. Mira- 
beau, hating all injustice and despotic violence, wrote his 
account to excite the sympathy of the world. It was a 
bold and spirited work. But he says of it himself, that his 
father would never allow it to be published, " notwithstand- 
ing the wish of all Corsica." " This work was, no doubt, 
very incorrect, but full of fire and truth ; and it contained 
true views and facts, relative to a country of which no cor- 
rect account had ever been given, because mercenary 
writers, (the Germanes,) or fanatical enthusiasts, (the Bos- 
wells,) had alone undertaken the task."* This work was 
written during a military campaign, and in his twentieth 
year — a proof of great energy. About this time his uncle 
writes : " I assure you, I found him very repentant of his 
past misdeeds. He appears to me to have a feeling heart ; 
as for wit, I have already mentioned that : he would cast 
the very devil into the shade. I tell you once more, either 
he is the cleverest and ablest banterer in the universe, or 
he will be the best subject in Europe to become either 
general, admiral, &c. For my own part, the lad cuts 
open my bosom, &c." Here follows the true secret, in a 
letter of his father's. " In St. John's name, do not trust to 
his excuses, or he will mould you with his hand. He 
knows how to appear as tame as a pet canary bird ; his 
head is like a wind-mill, and a fire-mill at the same time. 
* Mirabeau's account. Memoirs, Vol. I. p. 313. 



344 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

His imperturbable impudence will make his fortune, when 
once he becomes steady ; but I had rather not have a taste 
of it, and you will not, therefore, take it amiss, if I proceed 
more cautiously. I can never approve of fathers and sons 
being hail-fellow, well met."* In 1780, Mirabeau writes 
to his sister : " What I am more especially destined to by 
nature, if I am not much mistaken, is to be a soldier • for 
it is in battle only that I am cool, calm, and lively, without 
impetuosity. I then feel that I become taller." He was 
at this time composing a treatise on war, and had collected 
extracts from three hundred authors on that subject, which 
were in his uncle's library. 

In his father's political-economical theory he discovered 
no faith ; which the more widened the breach. Living now 
with his uncle, he showed vast literary diligence. The 
bailli became his firm friend and protector for many 
years. He says of him : " This head of his is a mill for 
reflections and ideas." And again : " He perfectly under- 
stands reason ; he listens to nothing else." 

At this time he devoted himself to an examination of his 
uncle's estate, and showed the greatest sense and under- 
standing in the economy of agriculture and management. 
Yet, even in his notes on these topics, an occasional sally 
discovers his natural hatred of arbitrary power. f 

Very early he aimed at eloquence. A friend took him 
by surprise one day in his chamber, while he was declaim- 
ing with great heat and energy. " What ! are you playing 
the Demosthenes ?" — " And why not?" replied Mirabeau; 
" perhaps a day may come, when the States-General will 
exist in France !" 

In his twenty-third year, while at Aix, in Provence, Mi- 
rabeau became acquainted with Mademoiselle Emilie de 
Marignane, the heiress of an extremely opulent family, and 
a young and very beautiful woman. The obstacle of a 
rival, who had the good will of her parents, prevented the 

* Mirabeau's account. Memoirs, Vol. 1. p. 319. 
t See Memoirs, Vol. I. p. 330. 



M I R A 11 E A U . 815 

marriage. To force them to a conclusion in his favor, Mi* 
rabeau ingratiated himself with one of the young lady's 
women, through whom he gained access to the house, and 
frequently passed the night there. He contrived to have it 
rumored about that the honor of the young lady herself 
was perilled by these visits ; a scandal which caused a 
withdrawal of his rival, and brought the parents themselves 
rather suddenly to terms.* 

This union failed to satisfy him, as might be expected. 
The young lady's income did not meet his hopes, being 
less than three hundred pounds sterling a year ; no great 
matter for a man of his habits. His wife, notwithstanding 
the dishonorable stratagem of her husband to obtain her 
hand, seems to- have been, in some measure, attached to 
him ; for she followed him into his retirement, whither he 
went in consequence of debts — his father refusing, of course, 
all relief. Here he found reason to quarrel with his wife, 
who was in some manner unfaithful to him. Soon after, 
having quitted his place of exile, he went secretly to visit 
his sister, and was discovered and again imprisoned by his 
father. In the chateau d'lf he employed himself in reading 
Tacitus and Rousseau, and thereupon wrote his Essai sur le 
Despotism, while smarting under his father's severity. 

In 1775, he was transferred to the fortress of Joux, near 
Pontarlier. He had been there only a short time when, by 
his agreeable and fascinating manners, he obtained the gov- 
ernor's permission to reside in the town. Here he became 
acquainted with Sophie de RufFey, the young and beautiful 
wife of the Marquis de Monnier, ex-president of the Cham- 
ber of Commerce at Dole, a man upwards of sixty years of 
age. Mirabeau instantly became enamored. A liason en- 
sued, and subsequently a law-suit and a sea of troubles. 
He gained his suit by a burst of the most splendid elo- 
quence, and fled from his father's anger, with Sophie, to 
Switzerland, and afterwards to Amsterdam, where he lived 
concealed — earning one gold louis a day by translating, and 
* Mirabeau's Letters, Vol. I. p. 33. 



346 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

Other literary labor. In Holland, Mirabeau wrote certain 
memoirs against his father, in a spirit of revenge, of which 
it is certain he afterwards repented. About this time he 
conceived the design of embarking for America, but failed 
of accomplishing it. A new order from the government, ob- 
tained by his father, placed him, after eight months' ab- 
sence, in the castle of Vincennes, where he nearly died 
from the severity of his imprisonment. 

In this imprisonment he wrote various licentious books, 
translated and compiled ; — Boccacio, Johannes Secundus, 
L'Erotica Biblion, a collection of obscenities, from the 
Scripture and Calmet's Commentaries, and various ancient 
authors. In 1784, he went to England, being now released 
from imprisonment, carrying with him a new mistress, 
Henrietta Von Haren, with whom he became acquainted in 
Holland. This was a love attachment, the woman herself 
being an amiable person of the most winning manners, and 
of a respectable family. Upon some pretence, he sent her 
over to Paris ; and finally deserted her for a Parisian woman 
called Le Jay, of profligate character, but who knew how to 
manage Mirabeau. She was flattering, artful, and voluptu- 
ous — qualities very sure to overcome him. 

In England Mirabeau matured his notions of liberty, and 
studied the forms of a limited monarchy, which he deemed 
most favorable to its preservation. His letters show a pro- 
found admiration for the English character and govern- 
ment.* He published in London, various political works. 
His first was, " The Cincinnati," an account of a projected 
society in the United States of America, which, however, 
had been written by him at Paris, with the assistance of Dr. 
Franklin and Champfort. His brain teemed with literary 
projects. His pen was his support. As an orator he made 
Chatham his model, and became acquainted with Wilkes, 
and other celebrated persons of the day. No man had 
greater facility in making and keeping friends. He had 
" the terrible power of familiarity ;" and was as easily af- 
* Miralbeau's Letters, 2 vols. London, 1832.— Trans. 



M I R A B E A U . 347 

fected by the passions of others as an infant — but was never 
broken or overcome by any degree of severity or arrogance. 
A trial of his own servant, Hardy, for robbing liim, made 
him acquainted with the forms of the English law, and 
trial by jury. He proposed, thereupon, to reform the 
French system of jurisprudence upon thd English model. 

In 1786 he appeared at Berlin, as has been supposed, on 
a secret mission from his government, to observe the Prus- 
sian court. Here he was admitted to an interview with 
Frederic the Great, and enjoyed a conversation with that 
monarch, then in his last illness. He addressed two letters 
to his successor, entitled, " Counsel to a young Prince, who 
means to reform his own Education." They are distin- 
guished by precision of style, depth of thought, and dignity 
of precept. 

While in Berlin, he joined the society of Illuminati, and 
published an essay on that institution, professing to disclose 
its secrets — but so singular in its details, it is by some sup- 
posed to be a hoax. He also ridiculed Lavater, and the 
impostor Cagliostro, in letters publicly addressed to them. 
At Berlin he collected materials for his history of the Prus- 
sian monarchy ; and wrote also a secret history and anec- 
dotes of that court. 

During Mirabeau's visit to London, says Dumont, in his 
" Recollections of Mirabeau," he was poor, and obliged to 
live by his writings. This was in 1784, when his reputa- 
tion was at the lowest. He was at this time in the 86th 
year of his age. He was then poor, and obliged to live by 
his writings. He had plans and sketches of various works, 
upon which he took good care to consult every person ca- 
pable of giving him information. Having become acquainted 
with a geographer, he meditated writing a universal geog- 
raphy ; and had any one offered him the elements of Chi- 
nesegrammar, he would no doubt have attempted a treatise 
on the Chinese language. Such was his confidence ' in his 
own capacity. He studied a subject while writing it, and 
wanted only an assistant to furnish the matter. He could 



348 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

contrive to get notes and additions from twenty different 
hands ; and had he been offered a good price, I am confi- 
dent, says Dumont, he would have undertaken to write an 
encyclopedia. Such was his enterprise. 

" His activity was prodigious. If he worked little himself, 
he made others work very hard. He had the art of finding 
out men of talent, and of successfully flattering those who 
could be of use to him. He worked upon them with in- 
sinuations of friendship, and ideas of public benefit. His 
interesting and animated conversation was like a hone, 
which he used to sharpen his tools. Nothing was lost to 
him. He collected with care, anecdotes, conversations, and 
thoughts ; appropriated to his own benefit the reading and 
industry of his friends — knew how to use the information 
thus acquired, so as to appear always to have possessed it — 
and when he had begun a work in earnest, it was seen to 
make a rapid and daily progress." 

He was no man of etiquette, and to carry his point, would 
gotothose who, through shame or contempt, would not come 
to him. 

" He was a delightful companion, in every sense of the 
word, and could overcome the strongest personal prejudices, 
by the generous and animated manner of his intercourse. 
He rejected the forms of good-breeding ; called people by 
their names, without the ceremonial addition ; and made 
it his first care to remove all obstacles to a familiar in- 
tercourse : — using an agreeable asperity, and a pleasant 
crudity of expression, more apparent than real ; for under 
the disguise of roughness, sometimes even of rudeness, was 
to be found all the reality of politeness and flattery. After 
the stiff and ceremonious conversations of formal good- 
breeding, there was a fascinating novelty in his, never 
rendered insipid by forms in common use. His residence in 
Berlin had supplied him with a stock of curious anecdotes : 
he was at this period" (1788, when Dumont first knew him, 
at Paris,) " publishing his book on the Prussian monarchy. 
This production consisted of a work by Major Mauvillon, 



M I R A B E A U . 349 

and extracts from four different memoirs, procured at great 
expense. No one could, for a moment, suppose that, during 
a residence of only eight months at Berlin, Mirabeau could 
himself have written eight volumes, in which he had in- 
troduced every possible information relative to the govern- 
ment of Prussia. He, as usual, employed the talents of 
others to serve his own designs." 

" Mirabeau enjoyed a high reputation as a writer. His 
work on the Bank of St. Charles, his " Denunciation of 
Stock-jobbing," his "Considerations on the order of Cincin- 
natus," and his " Lettres de Cacliet," were his titles to 
fame. But if all who had contributed to these works, had 
each claimed his share, nothing would have remained as 
Mirabeau's own, but a certain art of arrangement, some 
bold expressions, biting epigrams, and numerous bursts of 
manly eloquence, certainly not the growth of the French 
academy." 

He obtained from Claviere and Panchaud the materials 
for his writings on finance. Claviere supplied him with 
the subject matter of his letter to the King of Prussia. 
De Bourges was the author of his Address to the Batavians ; 
and I (says Dumont, from whom the above is a literal 
transcription,) have often been present at the disputes be- 
tween them, to which this circumstance gave rise. Though 
the authors he employed were enraged with his success at 
their expense, they could not afterwards destroy the reputa- 
tion they had aided in creating. Mirabeau (says Dumont) 
had a right to consider himself the parent of all these pro- 
ductions, because he presided at their birth, and without his 
indefatigable activity they would never have seen the light. 

" Claviere called Mirabeau a jackdaw, that ought to be 
stripped of his borrowed plumes; but this jackdaw, even 
when so stripped, was still armed with a powerful spur ; 
and of his own strength could soar above all the literary 
tribe. 

*' I will give an instance of his activity — of his avarice, I 
may say, in collecting the smallest literary materials. He 

30 



350 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

gave me a methodical list of the subjects \vc had discussed 
together in conversation, and upon which wo had differed. 
It was headed thus : " List of Subjects which Dumont en- 
gages, upon the faith of friendship, to treat conscienciously, 
and send to Mirabeau, very shortly after his (Dumont's) 
return to London. Diverse anecdotes on his residence 
in Russia; biographical sketches of several celebrated 
Genevese ; opinions on national education ;" eighteen items 
in all. A proof of his attention and memory. 

" Mirabeau could adopt every style of conduct and con- 
versation, and though not himself a moral man, he had a 
very decided taste for the society of those whose rigidity of 
principle, and severity of morals, contrasted with the laxity 
of his own." " His mode of inspiring confidence was to con- 
fess candidly, the faults and follies of his youth, express 
regret at his former errors, and declare that he would en- 
deavor to expiate them by a sedulous and useful application 
of his talents in future, to the cause of humanity and lib- 
erty ; without allowing any personal advantage to turn him 
from his purpose. He had preserved, even in the midst of 
his excesses, a certain dignity and elevation of mind, com- 
bined with energy of character, which distinguished him 
from those effeminate and worn-out rakes, those walking 
shadows, with which Paris swarmed ; and one was tempted 
to admit as an excuse for his faults, the particular circum- 
stances of his education, and to think that his virtues be- 
longed to himself, and that his vices were forced upon him. 
I never knew a man more jealous of the esteem of those 
whom he himself esteemed, or one who could be acted upon 
more easily, if excited by a sentiment of high honor ; but 
there was nothing uniform or permanent in his character. 
His mind proceeded by leaps and starts, and obeyed too 
many impetuous masters. When burning with pride or 
jealousy his passions were terrible ; he was no longer mas- 
ter of himself, and committed the most dangerous impruden- 
cies." — Dumont's RecoIIec, pp. 1-70. 

The assembling of the States-General excited in him the 



M I R A B E A U. 351 

highest, the most extravagant expectations. He foresaw 
the approach of calamity ; he determined — and whh him 
to determiiie and to execute were the same thing — to be- 
come himself its leader. 

At- 4 he lime of the first popular elections of the States- 
General, he went to Provence, the country of his ancestors, 
in hope of being chosen one of the deputies of the noblesse 
ftijlthat province ; but, rejected on the ground that he had 
no possession there, he took a shop, or warehouse, and in 
large letters placed over the door these words : — 

" MiRABEAU, MaRCHAND DE DrAP." 

He put on his apron, sold his wares, and thus ridiculed 
as the " Plebeian Count," he rendered himself so popular, 
that he was elected a deputy by acclamation, for that district. 

On his arrival at the latter city, previously to his elec- 
tion, bread happened to be exceedingly dear ; and the peo- 
ple .had, in consequence, risen. Mirabeau, whose command 
over the passions of the populace was at all times absolute, 
rushed to the balcony of his apartment, and harangued the 
mob then assembled beneath his window. His appeal thus 
concluded : — " Bread would not be dear enough were it at 
the price you wish ; and it would be too dear, were it to 
remain at the present price. I will see to it. Depart, and 
depart in peace." The clamor instantly ceased, and the 
people returned to their homes. 

Of this plebeian aristocrat — a designation of which Mira- 
beau seems to have been vain — La Harpe was accustomed 
to say, that he was naturally and essentially a despot; 
and that had he enjoyed the government of an empire, he 
would have surpassed Richelieu in pride, and Mazarin in 
policy.* 

" When the list of deputies was read -'at the opening 
of the States-General, many well-known names were re- 
ceived with applause, but Mirabeau's with hooting. Insult 
and contempt showed how low he stood in the estimation of 

* Mirabeau's Letters, during his resilience in England, vol. I,, p. 54. 



352 BfUGRAPlIlCAL ADDENDA. 

his colleagues, and it was even openly proposed to ^et his 
election cancelled. He had employed manoeuvres at Aix, 
and at IMarseilles, which were to be brought forward 
against the legality of his return ; and he himself felt so 
convinced, that his election at Marseilles could never be 
maintained, that he gave the preference to Aix." He had 
tried to speak on two or three occasions, but a general mur- 
mur always reduced him to silence. But being suddenly 
called upon to defend a friend, he astonished the Assembly 
with a burst of eloquent generosity, which overcame at a 
blow, all the prejudices against him, (for his reputation was 
then at the lowest possible ebb,) and gave him instant popu- 
larity. His dejection had been great, because of his pre- 
vious ill-success, and his emotion none the less at this sud- 
den rise of favor. From that time forth- he ruled the feel- 
ings of the nation, though at no time did he guide, or even 
modify its opinion. Like Burke, he loved the monarchy, 
while he understood the people. The secret of his power, 
as of his eloquence, was an unlimited generosity of soul. 

Such was his popularity, that though all titles of nobility 
were abolished, he retained his own. and was addressed by 
it ; and such his authority, he needed but to assure the peo- 
ple, the Court, the Assembly, of any measure, they believed 
that it would inevitably be accomplished. 

The latter years of his life were as splendid as the for- 
mer had been miserable ; he lived expensively, neglected 
his health, and died of excitement and the effects of intem- 
perate pleasures. 

Notwithstanding his constant dissipations, which he sup- 
ported by large bribes paid him by the Court to sustain their 
cause, his industry never seemed to relax. He was com- 
pelled to employ Dumont, and numbers of others, to write 
his speeches for him, which he read or declaimed in the As- 
sembly ; and on one occasion, at least, he was committed 
unawares, by delivering a speech which he had not studied : 
— yet, in his speeches, as in his literary compilations, it was 
the addition of a few bright thoughts, poignant witticisms, and 



M 1 R A B E A U . 353 

bursts of manly eloquence, with which he gave them his 
own character and his own fire. He possessed a bold and 
rapid power of ordering and organizing ; but for cool and 
judicious arrangement, for legal chicane or intrigue, he 
had neither the adroitness nor the patience. He never dis- 
covered the least trace of analytical or metaphysical talent, 
nor the head for tedious investigation. It was by principle, 
by the wisdom of the heart, the instinct of honor, the logic 
of courage, the flashing light of passion, he saw all that he 
saw ; his enormous pride precluded form and ceremony ; 
his unbounded hope, and self-reliance, carried him over the 
difficulties, and sustained him through the sorrows which 
they had themselves created. It is probable that a stronger 
man, take him altogether, never appeared in France; that 
there have been greater, few will deny ; for his strength 
wasted itself in struggling against obstacles created by its 
injudicious exhibition ; he drew down the rock upon himself, 
and then put forth all his force to sustain it. 

His death was indeed a national calamity ; Danton alone 
resembled him, and Danton was but a vulgar Mirabeau. 
There was no heart strong enough, after them, to feel and 
guide the nation. 

Mirabeau died April 2nd, 1791. His funeral was an his- 
torical event, and the whole nation felt his death. 

30* 



354 BlOGRAl'HICAL ADDENDA, 



DANTON. 

George James Danton, born at Arcis-sur-Aube, October 
26th, 1759, was a starving advocate until the age of thirty, 
when lie mingled with the Jacobins in Paris, and became 
their leading orator. " His great stature, commanding front, 
and voice of thunder, made him the fit leader of a band 
more timid or less ferocious than himself." — Alison. He 
rose in audacity and influence with the Jacobins. " Prodi- 
gal in expense, and drowned in debt, he had no chance, at 
any period, even of personal freedom, but in constantly ad- 
vancing with the fortunes of the Revolution. Like Mira- 
beau, he was the slave of sensual passions ; like him he was 
the terrific leader, during his ascendency, of the ruling- 
class ; but he shared the character, not of the Patricians who 
commenced the Revolution, but of the Plebeians who con- 
summated its wickedness. Inexorable in general measures, 
he was indulgent, humane, and even generous to individu- 
als ; the author of the massacres of the 2nd of September, 
he saved all those who fled to him, and spontaneously lib- 
erated his personal adversaries from prison. Individual el- 
evation and the safety of his party were his ruling objects ; 
a revolution appeared a game of hazard, where the stake 
was the life of the losing party ; the strenuous supporter of 
exterminating cruelty after the 10th of August, he was 
among the first to recommend a return to humanity, after 
the danger was past." — Alison. 

"Danton was more capable than any other of being the 
leader whom all ardent imaginations desired, for the pur- 
pose of giving unity to the revolutionary movements. He 
had formerly tried the bar, but without success. Poor and 



D A N T O N . 355 

consumed by passions, he then rushed into the political com- 
motions with ardor, and probably -with hopes. He was ig- 
norant, but endowed with a superior understanding, and a 
vast imagination. His athletic figure, his flat and somewhat 
African features, his thundering voice, his eccentric, but 
somewhat grand images, captivated his auditors at the Cor- 
deliers and the sections. His- face expressed by turns, the 
brutal passions, jollity, and even good-nature. Danton 
neither envied nor hated anybody, but his audacity was ex- 
traordinary, and in certain moments of excitement, he was 
capable of executing all that the atrocious mind of Marat 
was capable of conceiving. 

" Danton, the impassioned, violent, fickle, and by turns, 
cruel and generous man : — Danton, though the slave of 
his passions, must have been," from his nature, " incorrup- 
tible. Under pretence of compensating him for the loss of 
his former place of advocate in the council, the Court gave 
him considerable sums. But though it contrived to pay, it 
could not gain him. He continued, nevertheless, to ha- 
rangue and excite the mob against it. When he was re- 
proached with not fulfilling his bargain, he replied that, in 
order to keep the means of serving the Court, he was obliged 
in appearance to treat it as an enemy. Danton was there- 
fore the most formidable leader of those bands which were 
won and guided by public oratory. But audacious,, and 
fond of hurrying forward to the decisive moment, he was 
not capable of tliat assiduous toil which the thirst of rule re- 
quires ; and, though he possessed great influence over the 
conspirators, he did not yet govern them. He was merely 
capable when they hesitated, of rousing their courage and 
propelling them to a goal by a decisive plai'i of operations." 
—Thiers. 

When the advance of the Prussians against France was 
known at Paris, and occasioned the greatest consternation, 
Danton put himself at the head of affairs, and at once adopted 
the most energetic measures. He repaired to the commune 
and suggested that a list of all indigent persons be prepared 



356 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

nt the sections, and that they be furnished with pay and 
arms. In this manner was the reign of terror begun, by or- 
ganizing the paupers, bankrupts, thieves, outlaws, and rob- 
bers of the city against the better classes, who, tlie more per- 
fectly to serve the predominance of the mob, were visited 
and disarmed. "Let the reader fancy to himself a vast 
metropolis, the streets of which were a few days before 
alive with the concourse of carriages, and with citizens con- 
stantly passing and repassing — let him fancy to himself, I 
say, streets so populous and so animated, suddenly struck 
with the dead silence of the grave, before sunset, on a fine 
summer evening. All the shops are shut ; everybody re- 
tires into the interior of his house, trembling for life and 
property ; all are in fearful expectation of the events of a 
night in which even the efforts of despair are not likely to 
afford the least resource to any individual. The sole ob- 
ject of the domiciliary visits, it is pretended, is to search for 
arms, yet the gates of the city are shut and guarded with the 
strictest vigilance, and boats are stationed on the river, at 
regular distances, filled with armed men. Every one sup- 
poses himself to be informed against. Everywhere per- 
sons and property are put into concealment. Everywhere 
are heard the interrupted sounds of the muffled hammer, 
with cautious knock completing the hiding-place. Roofs, 
garrets, sinks, chimneys — all are just the same to a fear in- 
capable of calculating any risk. One man, squeezed up 
behind the wainscot which has been nailed back on him, 
seems to form a part of the wall ; another is suffocated with 
fear and heat between two mattresses ; a third, rolled up in 
a cask, loses all sense of existence by the tension of his 
sinews. Apprehension is stronger than pain. Men trem- 
ble, but they do not shed tears; the heart shivers, the eye 
is dull, and the breast contracted. Women on this occasion 
display prodigies of tenderness and intrepidity. It was by 
them most of the men were concealed. It was one o'clock 
in the morning when the domiciliary visits began. Patroles, 
consisting of sixty pikemen, were in every street. The 



D ANT ON. 357 

nocturnal tumult of so many armed men ; the incessant 
knocks to make people open their doors ; the crash of those 
that were burst off their hinges ; and the continual uproar 
and revelling which took place throughout the night in all 
tiie public houses, formed a picture which will never be ef- 
faced from my memory." — Peltier in Thiers. 

By this measure of Danton's, twelve or fifteen thousand 
persons were taken from their homes, and put in confine- 
ment. The greater part perished by massacre, or the guil- 
lotine, or the severity of their sufferings. All the liberal 
and enlightened men of Paris, and all who favored the 
cause of royalty or religion, or anything but Jacobinism and 
the mob, were thus swept together into a heap and extin- 
guished. There remained none to rule, but Danton, Robes- 
pierre, and their associates. 

By the contrivance of Danton, the massacres of the pris- 
oners taken on the night of the domiciliary visits, were or- 
ganized and carried into execution. 

At the same time he advocated measures of defence 
against the Austrians. Of Danton and Dumouriez, one the 
first political, the other the first military leader of the Jac- 
obin republic, Thiers says : '' Danton having shown as firm 
a countenance at Paris, as did Dumouriez at St. Menehould, 
they were regarded as the two saviours of the Revolution, 
and they were applauded together at all the public places 
where they made their appearance. A certain instinct 
drew these two men towards one another, notwithstanding 
the diflerence of their habits. They were the rakes of the 
two systems, who united with the like genius, the like love 
of pleasure, but with a different sort of corruption. Danton 
liad that of the people, Dumouriez that of the courts • but, 
more lucky than his colleague, the latter had only served 
generously and sword in hand, while Danton had been so 
unfortunate (?) as to sully a great character by the atroci- 
ties of September." 

Thus speaks the 7noraI Thiers. 



358 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

Danton proposed the organization of the- wor of La 
Vendee. 

When the leaders of the moderate party were all fled or 
put to death, and Marat had fallen by assassination, Danton 
and Robespierre remainded undisputed masters of the Re- 
public. But it was impossible for two such chiefs to stand 
long upon the same platform. The cunning and ostensible 
virtue of Robespierre, triumphed over the dissolute courage 
and carelessness of Danton. 

" An incredible mania of suspicion and accusation pre- 
vailed. The longest and most steady revolutionary life was 
now no security, and a person was liable to be assimilated 
in a day, in an hour, to the greatest enemies of the republic. 
The imagination could not so soon break the spell in which 
it was held by Danton, whose daring and whose eloquence 
had infused new courage in all decisive circumstances ; but 
Danton carried into the Revolution a most vehement passion 
for the object, without any hatred against persons ; and this 
was not enough. The spirit of revolution is composed of 
passion for the object and hatred against those who throw 
obstacles in its way — Danton had but one of these senti- 
ments. In regard to revolutionary measures tending to 
strike the rich, to rouse the indifferent to activity, and to de- 
velop the resources of the nation, he had gone all lengths and 
had devised the boldest and most violent means; but, easy 
and forbearing towards individuals, he did not discover ene- 
mies in all ; he saw among them men differing in character 
and intellect, whom it behooved him to gain or to take, with 
the degree of their energy, such as it was. He shook hands 
with noble generals, dined with contractors, conversed fa- 
miliarly with men of all parties, sought pleasure, and had 
drunk deeply of it during the Revolution." — Thiers. In 
fine, it began to be whispered by the friends of Robespierre 
and others, that Danton was not a good democrat; that he 
preferred elegant society ; loved his ease ; did not care es- 
sentially what course affairs might take, so long as he stood 
at their head. Those who did not dare attack him openly 



D ANT ON. 359 

slandered his friends — accused them of lukewarmness in the 
good cause of liberty. It began at last to be rumored that 
Danton had no distinct party to support him, but was rather 
a popular man in general, who consulted his own ambition 
more than the " public good." Reports of the most im- 
possible conspiracies were got up, and exaggerated from 
mouth to mouth, implicating the friends of Danton. 

Meanwhile Danton himself was too frequently absent from 
the club of Jacobins, where all was organized. Robespierre, 
on the contrary, neglected nothing, and was always in his 
place. Danton had to apologize for his seeming lukewarm- 
ness, a»d associating with moderate persons or suspected 
aristocrats. 

He gradually lost ground with the party. He was at 
length denounced as a bad statesman, in his absence. This 
was the first hint of his failing authority. The Convention, 
soon after, were about appointing a committee of public 
welfare, to conduct the wars of the republic. Robespierre 
was appointed and Danton with him; but he had lately 
married a young wife of whom he was deeply enamored, 
and was, moreover, weary of the Revolution, and unfit for the 
details of public business. With the advice of his friends 
he solicited permission to retire to Arcis-sur-Aulfe. As the 
nation had begun to feel its strength, the leader who had 
conducted them through the perils of the Revolution, and 
prepared all its most desperate measures, was no longer felt 
to be necessary. His leave of absence was granted him. 
He used it for two months, and lost his hold upon the pub- 
lic in the rapid current of affaii*. The war of La Vendee 
went on without him. On his return, it appeared that he 
did not approve of the dreadful massacres that had hap- 
pened in his absence. Though a partisan, a Jacobin, and an 
inventor of revolutionary measures, he had begun to con- 
demn the blind and ferocious employment of them. A 
strong party was soon formed against him in the club, which 
interrupted him when speaking, and cried out against mod- 



360 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

erates. Danton was opposed and questioned in the As- 
sembly. 

He was accused of a conspiracy to set Louis XVII. upon 
the throne, and of having intended to emigrate to Switzer- 
land. He repelled the charge successfully. Robespierre 
defended and successfully supported him ; a measure by 
which he proclaimed his own superiority, and destroyed the 
power of Danton forever. His party were weary of the 
atrocities of the Revolution, and vainly opposed the more 
furious of the Jacobins. 

Danton, meanwhile, continued to absent himself from 
Robespierre and the Jacobins, which gave opportilhities to 
his enemies, and nourished Robespierre's suspicions. Dan- 
ton, discovering the course of affairs, demanded an inter- 
view, and remonstrated against certain proposed atrocities ; 
Robespierre replied coolly, Danton sarcastically — and this 
was his first step towards the guillotine. 

Danton's friends warned him of his danger, and implored 
him to rouse himself, but he replied that he would rather be 
guillotined than guillotine — that his life was not worth the 
trouble, and he was weary of humanity. " The members 
of the committee seek my death ; well, if they effect their 
purpose, tftey will be execrated as tyrants ; their houses 
will be razed ; salt will be sown there ; and upon the same 
spot a gibbet, dedicated to the punishment of crimes, will be 
planted. But my friends will say of me that I have been 
a good fattier, a good friend, and a good citizen. They will 
not forget me : No — I would rather be guillotined than guil- 
lotine.''— Mignet, from Thiers— Edit. Note. 

When in the Conciergerie prison, he jested with his 
friends contemptuously on Robespierre, and remarked that 
they did not know how to govern men. Once, says Thiers, 
and once only, he regretted having taken part in the Revo- 
lution, and said it was better to be a poor fisherman than a 
riiler of men. 

Before the tribunal he showed his accustomed grandeur, 
and demanded to see his accusers ; scouting, at the same 



D ANTON. 361 

" Life/' he said, " was a burthen 
from which he longed to be delivered." By the great 
power of his eloquence he almost defeated the machinations 
of his enemies. No prisoner ever defended himself with a 
more terrible power. The trial continued four days. All 
the charges against him proved ineffectual. But the jury 
were intimidated by some of the more furious among them, 
and he was condemned, together with his friends. 

At the scaffold he gave way to no fear — but thinking of 
his wife, was moved for an instant. His death was as 
heroic as his life.* 

He was beheaded April 5th, 1794, in the thirty-sixth 
year of his age. 

With great qualities he united an atrocious mind, un- 
scrupulous, proud, and equal to any extremity of wicked- 
ness that served his purpose ; he was not a mere murderer, 
yet, with perfect coolness, could devise the assassination of 
thousands of the innocent and guilty. " Prudhomme de- 
votes twenty pages in his History of Crimes, to conversa- 
tions and papers, which prove with what frightful uncon- 
cern this terrible demagogue arranged everything for the 
great massacres." — Thiers, Ed. Note in. 

The history of Thiers is partial, even Jacobinical in its 
spirit. The author discovers an evident partiality for Dan- 
ton, and no very violent hatred of Robespierre. Men are 
not generally aware, that many whom they now overlook, 
perhaps despise as unequal to the strife of order and vir- 
tuous enterprise, need but the stimulus of fame, and the op- 
portunities of revolution, to become great in wickedness — to 
rival the Scyllas, Tamerlanes, Robespierres, and Dantons. 

* See the excellent account of in Thiers, vol. II. 
31 



362 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA, 



BENJAMIN CONSTANT. 

Henry Benjamin Constant de Rebecque was born at 
Lausanne, in the canton of Vaud, of a French family who 
took refuge in Switzerland, about the beginning of the sev- 
enteenth century, from religious persecution. He was ed- 
ucated in the school of Voltaire, and remained tinctured with 
scepticism through life. He had the misfortune early in 
life to lose his mother, and suffered from his father's indif- 
ference and neglect. His early promise was great, even to 
precocity, and discovered his inclination to men, and aptitude 
for the world. 

His education was continued at Oxford in England, where 
he became acquainted with Mackintosh, Erskine, Graham, 
and other persons afterwards distinguished on the liberal 
side in England. 

In 1787 he went to Paris, associated with the philosophi- 
cal reformers of the day, and led a dissipated life to the in- 
jury of his health. On a sudden he conceived the idea of 
travelling over England on foot, and actually accomplished 
the plan, living on a pittance and associating with the ordi- 
nary people of the country. His father called him home, 
and forgave him this freak on condition of his taking the 
post of chamberlain in the Court of the Duke of Brunswick. 
Here his sarcastic contempt for the antiquated ceremonies 
of the Court made him an object of general dislike. He 
made epigrams on the courtiers, derided their customs, and 
made no secret of his sceptical principles. To make mat- 
ters worse, he married a noble lady in the service of the 
Duchess of Brunswick, whose feudal prejudices and proud 
temper soon brought about the necessity for a divorce. 



BENJAMIN CONSTANT. 363 

After this event he returned to Switzerland, and in 1794, 
met, for the first time, with the celebrated Madame de Stael, 
whose character at once impressed him with admiration and 
respect. Of her he says, " such an union of imposing and 
attractive qualities, so much justness of thought, such 
charms, simplicity and frankness. She is truly a superior 
being, only to be found once in a century." 

The overthrow of the terrorists in Paris, was a fortunate 
moment for his return to the capital. This was in 1795. 
Constant undertook to defend the Directory, then in a state 
of disreputable weakness and vacillation between the old 
and new. 

In 179G, being in the thirtieth year of his age. Constant 
published a conservative pamphlet in favor of sustaining the 
authority of the government. Bonaparte being now First 
Consul, Constant was elected one of the Tribunats, char2;ed 
with defending the State against the encroachment of des- 
potism. Bonaparte put an end to this head without an arm, 
by driving Constant and de Stael into exile. This ladj'", of 
course, gained a vast reputation. The friends retreated into 
Germany, and were received at Wieniar by Goethe and his 
literati with the greatest honor. 

Constant began now to compose his work on Religion, but 
meddled no more with Napoleon. In 1813, after the fail- 
ure of the Russian invasion, he reappeared in politics, in a 
work entitled — " The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation in 
its relations to Modern Civilization,'^ in which he traced with 
great power the destructive career of Bonaparte, and showed 
the ruin to society that must follow from the principles 
which actuated him. He showed the necessity of establish- 
ing a new and constitutional system of government, to pro- 
tect the laws, learning, industry, and civilization of society. 

In 1814, on the return of the Bourbons, Constant went to 
Paris and wrote in favor of the legitimate sovereign. Na- 
poleon's return from Elba, called out violent invectives from 
his pen ; — he styles him an Attila, a Ghengis-Khan. But 
no sooner was the Emperor fairly seated on his throne, 



364 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

when Constant accepted office under him, with the title of 
Councillor of State. He thought if he could not prevent 
the despotism, he would make the best he could of it for the 
country. 

The second exile of Napoleon left Constant in danger of 
his life from the new government. He took refuge in Eng- 
land for fifteen years, and apologized for his conduct in an 
account of the " Hundred Days of Napoleon. ^^ 

Returning to Paris at the end of this period, he again en- 
tered into politics, wrote political pamphlets, and became a 
principal editor of the " Minerva," a periodical review. 

In 1819 he became a member of the Chamber of Depu- 
ties. The ultras endeavored to expel him on the plea of 
his being a foreigner. He defended himself in a three days' 
trial, and proved his derivation from a family of French 
Protestants. After this, he sat in the Chambers till his 
death. It is said of this popular orator that his form was 
tall, his head slightly stooping, his face care-worn, but orig- 
inal and expressive. 

After the Revolution of July 1830, he was called to be- 
come one of the first Ministers of State ; but he was al- 
ready struck with a fatal malady, and died in December of 
the same year, at the age of sixty-three. His funeral was 
made a time of national mourning. He was reckoned 
among the greatest defenders of constitutional liberty. 

In his great work on Religion, which occupied all the leis- 
ure of thirty years of his life, he assumes that the relig- 
ious principle is inherent in the human soul, but that the 
forms which express it are always, and of necessity, tran- 
sient and perishable. These forms, he says, are the doc- 
trines and worship of all nations, heathen and Christian. 
He makes no exception in favor of Christianity, though he 
treats it with marked respect. 



RO YE R-COLL ARD. 365 



ROYER-COLLARD. 

Pierre Paul Royer-Collard was born in a small town 
of Champagne, June 21st, 1763. His parents were respec- 
table farmers. He showed talent, and was sent to a col- 
lege of monks to be educated. His Protestant inclinations 
appeared early, and not inclining to the church, he studied 
law, and was admitted to the bar at Paris. 

Imbibing the spirit of the Revolution, he became secretary 
of the Paris municipality, but left Paris and remained con- 
cealed through the bloody days of the Reign of Terror ; but 
he did not desert his post in the Convention until he had 
raised his voice against the furious measures of the Jacobins. 

In May, 1797, when the Directory was established, M. 
Collard was appointed one of the Council of Five Hundred, 
and soon formed an intimacy with members of the moderate 
monarchical party. He even corresponded secretly with the 
Bourbons, until the time that Bonaparte began to predomi- 
nate. He then turned his mind to philosophy, and was in- 
fluenced by the works of Reed and Stewart, principally be- 
cause of the spirit of morality which they uphold. In 1811 
he was appointed professor of Philosophy in Paris, and for 
three years drew considerable audiences. His discoveries 
did much to revive the philosophical spirit in France, which 
had been plunged in the grossest materialism. Royer-Col- 
lard undertook to revive spiritualisjUj and taught the doc- 
trine of Ideas, and of the immortality of the soul. His man- 
ner was diffuse, but plain and grave, his influence moral and 
salutary in the extreme. 

On the return of the Bourbons, R. Collard entered again 
into political life, and became director-general of the library, 

31* 



366 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

with influence in preparing laws relative to the liberty of 
the press, which he supported inconjunction with legitimacy, 
holding them equally indispensable. His position was a 
philosophical mean, between the bigots and the liberals. Yet 
he was attacked as a revolutionist by the friends of Charles 
X., who neglected his advice, and consequently lost the 
crown by the Revolution which placed Louis Philippe upon 
the throne. He seems to have been very nearly the most 
respected and respectable statesman of his day, but a little 
too theoretic and abstract to have a solid influence in aflTairs. 
Yet in 1827, so great was the confidence of the nation in 
his integrity, he was chosen deputy by no fewer than seven 
constituencies at once, and became President of the Cham- 
bers. 

After the Revolution of July, 1830, Royer-CoUard, who 
had always supported legitimacy, and had been the friend 
of the Bourbons— though they owed their ruin to neglect of 
his public advice, — found it necessary to retire from public 
office at the age of sixty-three. Though he remained fif- 
teen years in the Chamber of Deputies, he made but two 
speeches in all that time, one to defend hereditary dignities for 
the peerage, and a second to support the liberty of the press. 
It is said of him that he was the first to introduce philosoph- 
ical principles into government in France, and that he gave 
to her present generation of statesmen their political educa- 
tion. In private life he was exemplary, and avoided in- 
trigue. His countenance was manly and grave, — his wit 
penetrating and excellent. 



LAMARTINE. 367 



LAMARTINE. 

Alphonse de Lamartine, the latest of distinguished 
French Poets, was born October 21st, 1780, at Macon, on 
the Saone. His family name was De Prat ; but on the 
death of his maternal uncle, the poet inheriting his fortune, 
assumed his name, De Lamartine. His father was a Major of 
Cavalry under Louis XVI. ; his mother the grand-daughter 
of an Under Governess of the Princess of Orleans. These 
were dangerous circumstances in the Revolution ; — the ear- 
liest remembrances young Lamartine had of his father wq§p 
of visiting him in a dungeon. But the indiscriminating axe 
happened to spare the royal Cayalry Major ; — he exchanged 
his prison for a residence in the little village of Milles. 
There the future poet was so fortunate as to pass a quiet 
boyhood, surrounded by the most beautiful landscape ; — its 
valleys and streams and high mountains, with memories of 
his mother and sisters, are reflected in the poet's writings. 

Lamartine received his collegiate education at Belley. 
Having taken his degree, he lived some months at Lyons, 
travelled for a time in Italy, and finally arrived at Paris, — 
the end of all Frenchmen — during the latter days of the Em- 
pire. It is said, that he was not altogether proof against the 
dissipations of the French metropolis. He, however, pur- 
sued his studies with some diligence. In 1813 he went 
again to Italy ; — the impressions of its scenes and influences 
are observable in his subsequent poems. 

Napoleon fell, and Lamartine, having returned from Italy, 
became a Bourbon body-guard. Tlie Hundred Days fol- 
lowed soon after, during which he was wise enough to keep 
quiet. Love however, had probably something to do with 



368 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

his reserve. But Elvire died : — Lamartine, awaking from 
his sorrow, became a poet. 

The " Meditations Poctiques^^ were published in 1820. 
It was a long time before the young poet could find a pur- 
chaser for his manuscripts. " At last," says a Parisian cor- 
respondent in one of our Journals, " a publisher named Ni- 
col — more discerning or more generous than others — ac- 
cepted the manuscript, that was everywhere stained with 
tears, and it soon appeared, without the support of a name or 
even a preface. Lamartine's wish respecting his work, 
seems to be expressed in the invocation in the last verse of 
the " Meditations.'' 

Quand lajeuille des bois tomhe dans la prairie, 
Le vent du soi se leve et Varrache aux vallons ; 

Et moijje suis semblable a lafcuillejletrie 
Emportez-moi comme die, orageux Aquillonsl 

When the leaf of the wood falls in the meadow, 
The night wind rises and blows it to the valleys — 
And me — I am like to the withered leaf; 
Bear me away like it. oh, stormy North Wind !" 

The " Meditations^' took the public by surprise. They 
were different from all previous French poetry, both in sen- 
timent and execution. Their popularity was sudden and 
universal. More than fifty thousand copies were sold. 

His reputation, and the loyalty he had preserved, 
(through indolence, perhaps, as much as through principle,) 
procured the favor of the government, and he was attached 
to the Legation at Florence. "^ A short time afterwards he 
married an English girl of much wealth and beauty. The 
death of his uncle also added to his means, so that he was 
now independent. His next appointment was as Secretary 
to the Embassy at Naples — then in the same capacity at 
London. 

In 1823 he published his " Mort de Socrate" — not so suc- 
cessful as the " Meditations." It has manj beautiful pas- 
sages, but the plan is unfinished, the language unequal, and 



L A M A R T I N E . 369 

the versification careless. These are faults, however, be- 
longing more or less to all Lamartine's productions; his 
poems are uniformly of a loose structure. 

The "Nouvelles Meditations Poetiques," which appeared 
the same year, carried the public back to the impressions 
produced by his first volume. They contained the same 
bold and elevated sentiments, and those flights of imagination 
so unusual in French poetry. Not long after he was bold 
(or rash) enough to attempt the addition of a fifth Canto to 
" Childe Harold." With many fine passages, it was in 
such connection necessarily a iailure. It is not within the 
capacity of Lamartine to attain to the depth and volume, 
and sombre coloring of the powerful current of the Eng- 
lishman's poetry. It was productive, however, of one im- 
portant result. It contained at the end a bitter reflection 
on the fallen state of Italy, for which a Neapolitan officer 
challenged him, and the poet nearly lost his life in the 
duel. ^ 

Returning to France in 1829, he put forth the "Harmonies 
Portigues et Religieuses ;" but as the times were greatly 
disturbed, and France not very religious, they did not at- 
tract much attention. The next year he was made a mem- 
ber of the Academy, and afterwards appointed Minister to 
Greece. Before he could go, the Revolution of July oc- 
curred, and the powers that appointed him were overthrown. 

A new phase of his life now took place. When the new 
dynasty was plainly established, the poet concluded to turn 
politician. His first efforts on this field were not so success- 
ful as they had been on the field he had left. He offered 
himself as Deputy at Dunfeerque and at Toulon — he was 
defeated in both places. 

» Naturally sick of his new employment, he determined to 
travel through the East, and especially the Holy Land. 
Such an exploration appears to l!ave been among his early 
dreams. His boy hoo^ recollections account for this desire. 

" My mother," he says, in some autobiographical pas- 
sages of his writings, " had received from her mother, 



370 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

when on her death-bed, a beautiful Royanmont Bible, in 
whicli she learned me to read when I was a little cliild. This 
Bible had many pictures of sacred subjects, and when I had 
read quite correctly a half page of the history, my mother 
would show me a picture, and holding the book open upon 
her knees make me contemplate it for my reward. * * * 
The silvery, tender, solemn and impassioned tone of her 
voice, added to all she said an accent of force, of charm 
and of love which remains still at this moment in my ear — 
alas — after six years silence." 

He sailed from Marseilles in May, 1832, and occupied 
with his tour thirteen months. Though naturally suffi- 
ciently simple in his tastes, he made his pilgrimage osten- 
tatious and splendid; 

" His train consisted of twenty horsemen — his rich tent 
was stored with arms and luxuries — the cities opened their 
gates to him — the Sheiks came out to meet and salute him 
r— the Arabs of the Desert bowed themselves as he passed, 
and the Governors became responsible for his safety with 
their heads." 

But the ability to make so brilliant a display could not 
preserve him from the deepest misfortune. His young 
daughter, Julia, in whom much of his happiness was bound 
up, died at the end of his tour — the vessel which brought 
him to the East, carried back her corpse. 

On his return, he found himself elected Deputy from 
Dunkerque. His speech, delivered in January, 1834, dis- 
appointed all parties. Everybody listened to it ; every- 
body admired it ; nobody could understand it. The poet 
Deputy remained alone as " De Lamartine." 

The next year he published ^^ Jocelyn,^^ which added to 
his poetical reputation. Some other productions have since 
followed, mostly, of unequal merits. 

Lamartine's speeches onpthe great question of the East — 
a topic which he was prepared to i^derstand — embracing 
proposals for the bases 'of a new European system, first 
gave him position in the Chambers. Subsequent speeches 



L A M A RT 1 N E. 371 

against the death-punishment, in favor of foundlings, and 
on similar subjects, put him subsequently at the head of 
what are called in France, the Socialists — a party, which 
like a clique under the same name in this country, have no 
definite ends in view, and no definite means by which they 
propose to attain them. 

The qualities of Lamartine's writings are peculiar to him 
among French poets. He has something of Rousseau ; 
something of De Stael — but no poet among his countrymen 
can be compared with him. The spirit of his verse is Eng- 
lish rather than French, though he lacks the English terse- 
ness. Instead of the classical school of France, he seems to 
have made Young and Byron his models, adding also the study 
of ihe romantic in the German and British Poets. Thus 
it is, that he yields himself up, as no Frenchman before him 
has done, to the dominion of a thoughtful and solemn imag- 
ination. His chief characteristics are a dreamy melan- 
choly often bordering on gloom, " a longing lost in sorrow- 
ful misgiving, an inclination to the mystical and superna- 
tural, and a great predilection for poetical landscape paint- 
ing." Even among English productions, his poems would 
be found to have great depth and feeling ; his language, 
also, has both variety and beauty, though usually too diffuse, 
and sometimes bombastic. One quality, at least, he pos- 
sesses, wortliy of especial notice and praise — he is profoundly 
earnest, a characteristic in which the poetry of the French, 
so light and superficial, has been deficient ever since the 
age of Boileau. 

In addition to Cormenin's striking " portrait" of the poet- 
politician, a passage may be taken from the excellent cor- 
respondent before referred to : — 

" De Lamartine is of good height and elegant form. His 
face is a little thin, and it is marked by the deep lines 
which distinguish the nervous fhan. His chin is slightly 
projecting, and his nost large, and inclining to the aquiline. 
His eyebrows are heavy, projecting, and quite arched ; and 



372 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

hfts grayish hair is arranged with the greatest attention over 
a fine forehead. 

" M. de Lamartine is a man of rare contradictions — he 
is proud and simple, good-natured and ironical, light and 
profound, ambitious and indolent ; he is equally in love with 
the world and seclusion, with pleasure and retirement. He 
loves to be praised, and dislikes to make acquaintances. In 
conversation he hears himself only, and with an extremely 
good-natured contempt, he laughs at the man whom he can- 
not convince, paining him with his pride as much as he 
charms him by his affability. With all these faults, there 
are few men who have a greater power over others in con- 
versation, and though the impressions which he leaves upon 
one's mind are never deep, and always mingled of pleasure 
and regret, still he is a man whom one will always wish to 
see again. 

"At his house everything is in the most exact order, and 
though his fortune is something wasted, he will be found in 
the midst of studied elegance, in which his horses and dogs 
share their part, for horses and dogs are among his favor- 
ites." 

Thus, " proud, simple, contemptuous, social, ambitious, in- 
dolent — always talking of principle, but always pushed on 
by the impulses of imagination — with theories so grand 
that nobody can follow him, and with so many minute ex- 
ceptions, that he can follow nobody else — a man of the most 
sublime and beautiful thoughts, yet lacking that common 
sense which carries many who are less able to greater suc- 
cess — M. de Lamartine is a person who does not well un- 
derstand himself, and who is not well understood by others. 
Well did one who undertook to write the poet's life close 
the third revision of his history by saying, 

" ' Decidemeni, la hiograpJile de M. de Lamartine ne^styos- 
sihie qii'apres sa mort.' 

" Decidedly, the biography of M. de Lamartine is not 
possible until after his death." 



G u I z o T . 373 



GUIZOT. 

Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot was born at Nismes, 
where his father fell by the guillotine, in the general catas- 
trophe of the Dantonist party. His parents were Protes- 
tants, and held a respectable position in society. In his sev- 
enth year his mother went with him to Geneva, and plaoed 
him in the Gymnase de Geneva, where he became a diligent 
and excellent scholar. His ciiaracter was early marked 
by sense, and his demeanor by gravity. Such was his dil- 
igence, in four years he had acquired six languages ; and 
after six years of study, he was first of the school in history 
and philosophy. 

In 1805, Guizot began his law studies at Paris, and the 
gravity and severity of his character, contributed, with 
want of friends and poverty, to keep him a long time in ob- 
scurity. 

The second year of his residence in Paris brought him a 
preceptorship in a family of great respectability ; where he 
was treated according to his singular merits, and brought 
into connection with influential society. 

In this situation he became acquainted with Mademoiselle 
Pauline de Meulan, a lady of excellent attainments and 
character, and of a distinguished family, but impoverished 
by the Revolution. She had taken up the occupation of a 
journalist, and was suddenly prevented in the course of her 
duties by a serious illness. Her family being dependent on 
her labors, the interruption was critical, and might have 
been fatal. She is said to have made a public offer for the 
best assistance. M. Guizot sent her a letter, enclosing a 
good article. It was accepted, and followed by several 

32 



374 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

Others. The affair led to a personal friendship, and five 
years after, to a marriage between the parties. The lady- 
is said to have been perfectly worthy of him. In 1809, M. 
Guizot, always engaged in literary labors, published his 
first work — Le Dlctionnaire des Synonymes. This was in 
the twenty-third year of his age. He followed it with 
" Lives of the French Poets," a translation of Gibbon's Ro- 
man Empire, with valuable notes; and a translation of a 
Spanish work — "Spain in 1808." 

In 1812, being in his twenty-sixth year, he became ad- 
junct professor of history in the University, and soon after 
the professorship of history was given to him. 

In 1814, through the friendship of Royer-CoUard, he be- 
came secretary.general to the Minister of the Interior. 

Bonaparte's return from Elba sent Guizot back to his 
professorship. 

The Constitutionalists sent him to plead the cause of their 
charter before Louis XVIII. in Ghent — a duty which he 
performed successfully. 

In 1815, his reputation being fully established, he was made 
secretary to the Minister of Justice, and became one of the 
leaders of the party of Doctrinaires, who adopted certain 
philosophical views of justice and of government. This 
party, it was said, might all have sat upon one sofa. The 
assassination of the Due de Berri, caused an expulsion 
of the Constitutionalists from office, and Guizot lost his 
place. He then gave himself wholly to letters, and pub- 
lished various historical works and compilations, besides 
essays on Shakspeare and review articles. 

In 1827, he lost his first wife — a heavy grief to him. 
This lady hos been highly eulogized, as a person of extra- 
ordinary capacity and worth. Though born a Catholic, it 
is said, that for her husband's sake, who gave her religious 
consolation in death, she died a Protestant. 

During the ministry of Polignac, the College of Lisieux 
elected M. Guizot to the Chamber of Deputies. He as- 
sisted in the Revolution of 1830, and wrote the famous pro- 



GuizoT. 375 

test of the Chamber against the royal ordinances. He be- 
came Minister of Public Instruction ; afterwards of the In- 
terior ; and in this last office exercised the power of expel- 
ling and replacing office-holders, with great freedom. Since 
then, M. Guizot has been the undoubted first man in the 
French political world. Thiers only rivals him in public esti- 
mation. M. Guizot is a philosopher, and a very rigid ruler. 
He inclines evidently to a strong and even a despotic gov- 
ernment. He is neither democratic nor aristocratic, but con- 
stitutional. 

We gather from other sources that M. Guizot is a mem- 
ber of the Reformed Church, and that his character has an 
English cast, for gravity and reserve ; but that when it 
pleases him to be affiible, his powers of entertainment are 
very great. 

Under the Huguenot persecution his grandfather, Francis 
Guizot, was one of those who suffered persecution and ex- 
ile, and preached to his scattered flock for forty years, in 
danger of his life. 

Of M. Guizot's mother, whose husband fell by the guillo- 
tine under Robespierre, it is said that her care and exemplary 
piety formed the principles and guided the conduct of her 
son. In July, 1845, this venerable person was still living. 

Of Guizot's proficiency in early life, it is reported that at 
the age of fifteen, he could read in their native languages, 
Demosthenes, Tacitus, Dante, Goethe, and Shakspeare. 

The story of his first acq.uaintance with Mademoiselle de 
Meulan is variously told. We know of no version of it per- 
fectly trustworthy. She wrote books on education. It is said 
that her husband's in fluence contributed to develop her talents. 

M. Guizot married a second time, but is now a widower. 

M. Guizot's doctrinaires support the authority of Reason 
as the source of law. Of course no one knows precisely 
what is meant by that term, but M. Guizot's '•' Reason" is 
at present very analogous with the more ancient, " Reasons 
of State," the great argument of those who love and sup- 
port despotism. It is not probable that M. Guizot has much 



376 BlOGRAPinCAL ADDENDA. 

respect for the opinion of the people, however much lie may 
desire to secure their happiness. 

Of M. Guizot's private conduct his contemporaries speak 
with unqualified respect. Instead of employing his office 
to enrich himself, he remains comparatively poor. His for- 
mer colleagues have amassed millions, he, on the contrary, 
has but a small country-house at a short distance from Paris, 
and will leave his children no inheritance but his name. 

His manners are reported to have a certain hardness, con- 
sistent with his stoical principles. He evidently loves 
power, and feels that he was born to command. 

His great merit is constitutionality, — he puts all govern- 
ment into a solid and equitable form. 



THIERS. 

Louis Adolphe Thiers was born at Marseilles, April 
0th, 1797. His father was a locksmith and small iron 
dealer, and his mother a daughter of a bankrupt merchant, 
of a poor but proud family. 

By the influence of some relations, Adolphe was admitted 
a free scholar in the Imperial Lyceum of Marseilles, where 
be acquitted himself creditably until 1815, when he re- 
moved to Aix, to enter upon the study of law. Here he 
formed a lasting friendship with Mignet the historian, who 
was his fellow-student. In this situation, Thiers added his- 
tory, philosophy, and belles-lettres, to his law studies, and 
imbibed radical notions. Even then he showed traces of the 
demagogue — declaimed against the Restoration, and made 
himself suspected by the police and hated by the faculty of 
the college. 



M . THIERS. . 377 

Rather than confer the prize of eloquence upon him, his 
instructors adjourned the trial a year, when, producing the 
same piece, he was outdone, much to their satisfaction, by 
an anonymous oration sent from Paris ; but what was their 
subsequent mortification to fiiud that this also was a produc- 
tion of their mischievous little Jacobin, who had taken this 
pleasant method of entrapping iJiem. 

As a lawyer in Aix, Thiers could get no employment, 
and went with Mignet to Paris. 

During the first months of their rcvsidence in Paris, our 
two aspirants took a lodging, which, since their arrival at 
fame and fortune, has become classic ground. The house 
of Shakspeare at Stratford-on-Avon, was never visited by 
Ahe votaries of the bard with more enthusiasm than the ad- 
mirers of French literature have examined the dwelling of 
the future Prime Minister of France, and the distinguished 
Professor of History. A dirty dark street in the purlieus 
of the Palais Royale, is called the Passage Montesquieu, sit- 
uate in the most crowded and noisy part of Paris. Here 
you ascend by a flight of steps into a gloomy and miserable 
lodging-house, in the fifth story of which a smoked door con- 
ducts you into two small chambers, opening one from the 
other, which were the dwellings of two men, whose celeb- 
rity, within a few years afterwards, filled the world. A 
common chest of drawers, of the cheapest wood, a bed to 
match, two rush-bottom chairs, a little rickety nut-wood 
table, incapable of standing steadily on its legs, and a white 
calico curtain, formed the inventory of the furniture which 
accommodated the future Prime Minister of the greatest 
country in Europe, and the future Historian of the Revolu- 
tion.* 

After some time spent in poverty and restlessness, Thiers 
presented himself to Manuel, who was just then expelled 
from the Chamber, under Villele's ministry. Manuel re- 
ceived him as a friend and partisan, and introduced him to 
Lafitte, who got him a place among the editors of the Con^ 
* American Review: Dec. and Jan., 1S46-7. 



378 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

stitutlonncll. His bold articles in that paper excited great 
attention ; and the young politician, in despite of poverty, 
found himself drawn into the best circles of Paris. 

He became a constant and admired frequenter of the 
most brilliant assemblies of Lafitte, Casimir-Perier, and 
Count Flahaut. The Baron Louis, the most celebrated 
financier of that day, received him as his pupil and friend, 
and at his table a place was always provided for M. Thiers. 

He gleaned much in conversation, was a good talker and 
listener ; and gathered anecdotes and facts for a history of 
the French Revolation, which he was then composing. 

By the eclat of his history he gained valuable friends. 
One of them, an obscure German bookseller, Schubert, 
(whom he afterwards, when elevated to power, painfully 
neglected,) having conceived a devoted admiration for him, 
solicited on his behalf a rich publisher beyond the Rhine, 
Baron Cotta, and obtained funds by which one-half of the 
Constitutionel was purchased and put into Thiers' hands. 

This enabled him to change his habits of life, and from a 
poor scholar in his garret, he shone out a Parisian man 
about town. He was, however, exceedingly diligent, and 
made the utmost improvement of the fortune thus placed at 
his disposal. He rose at five in the morning, and from that 
hour till noon, applied himself to the columns of the Jour- 
nal, which soon in his hands quintupled its receipts. After 
having thus devoted six hours to labor which most persons 
consume in sleep and idleness, he would go to the office of 
the paper and confer with his colleagues, among whom 
were MM. Etienne, Jay, and Everiste Dumoulin. His 
evenings were passed in society, where he sought not only 
to extend his connections, but to collect information, which 
he well knew how to turn to account. In accomplishing 
his object, some struggle was necessary to overcome his per- 
sonal and physical disadvantages. 

" In stature he is diminutive, and although his head presents 
a large forehead, indicative of intellect, his features are 
common, and his figure clumsy, slovenly, and vulgar. An 



M . THIERS. 379 

enormous pair of spectacles, of which he never divests him- 
self, half cover his visage. When he begins to speak you 
involuntarily stop your ears, offended by the nasal twang of 
his voice, and the intolerable provincial sing-song of his dia- 
lect. In his speech there is something of the gossip ; in his 
manner there is something of * * He is restless and 
fidgety in his person, rocking his body from side to side in 
the most grotesque manner. At the early part of his ca- 
reer, to which we now refer, he was altogether destitute of 
the habits and convenances of society, and it may be imag- 
ined how singular a figure lie presented in the elegant 
salons of the Faubourg Chaussee I'Antin. Yet this very 
strangeness of appearance and singularity of manners, 
gained him attention, of which he was not slow to profit. 
His powers of conversation were extraordinary. No topic 
could be started with which he did not seem familiar. If 
finance were discussed, he astonished and charmed the 
bankers and capitalists. If war were mentioned, and the 
victories of the Republic and Empire referred to, the old 
marshals, companions of Napoleon, listened with amazement 
to details, which seemed to have come to the speaker by 
revelation, being such as only an eye-witness could have 
given, and a thousand times better and more clearly de- 
scribed, than they, who were present on the scene of action, 
could have given them. In short, in a few months, M. 
Thiers was the chief lion of the salons of the Notables of 
the opposition under the Restoration."* 

Soon after he founded a new paper, the " National," 
more radical in its tendency, and aided by the radical party 
in the Chambers, made it noticed and feared. 

He directed his writings and conversation against the ad- 
ministration of Polignac, and absoluteism, and attacked 
every ministerial measure with great fury. 

At the Revolution of July, 1830, he was the first to invite 
Louis Philippe to the throne, but had not discovered any 
great courage in the Revolution itself; on the contrary, it 



380 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

is said, he retreated to a place of safety, at the first 
tokens of violence, and talked rather weakly of legal meas- 
ures to insure order. 

Elected, however, a deputy from Aix, he appeared in the 
new Assembly, dressed, it is said, a la Danton, and made 
himself hated and ridiculous by his bombast and insolence. 
In return his proper misanthropy was not much diminished. 

On the dissolution of the Lafitte ministry, he deserted his 
old friends, and went over to the hereditary peerage party 
in the Chambers. He became a violent Monarchist. 

Up to this time Thiers' parliamentary efforts had been 
mostly failures. This year, 1831, on the important ques- 
tion of a hereditary peerage, he delivered a speech of four 
hours' length, which with numerous defects held the atten- 
tion of the Chamber, and established his reputation as an 
orator. With the restlessness of his nature, he let no op- 
portunity slip of improving the impression he had made. 
The next year, in particular, he seized upon a very pe- 
culiar and happy exigence. M. Thiers was to furnish 
them a long and complicated report of the committee on the 
Budget. A protracted debate then in progress was expected 
to continue much longer. It happened unexpectedly, how- 
ever, that the debate was suddenly brought to a close on the 
22nd of January, the day on which it commenced, and the 
report on the Budget was the order of the day for the 23rd. 
To write a report so voluminous in a single night, was a 
mechanical impossibility, to say nothing of the mental part 
of the process. What was to be done? Such reports are 
always prepared in writing and read to the Chamber for this 
obvious reason, that although necessarily the composition of 
an individual member of the committee, they are in fact sup- 
posed to proceed, and do really possess the sanction of all 
the members of the committee, as well as of that individual 
member who is more especially charged with their composi- 
tion. M. Thiers, however, pressed by the exigency of the 
occasion, and not sorry to find an occasion for playing off a 
parliamentary tour deforce, went down to the Chamber on 



M. THIERS. 381 

the morning of the 23rd. He presented himself in the Tri- 
bune, and apologizing to the Chamber for being compelled 
to depart from the usage of the House, by the unexpectedly- 
early period at which the report was called for, in giving a 
viva voce and unwritten report, he proceeded at once to the 
subject aided only by a few numerical memorandas, and de- 
livered a speech of four hours' duration, in which he discus- 
sed and exhausted every topic bearing on the matter of the. 
Budget. He plunged with the more ready and voluble flu-'- 
ency, into financial, political, and administrative details, un- 
folded with a logical perspicuity, an arithmetical order and 
precision, and intermingled with bursts of picturesque ora- 
tory with which he astonished. and confounded the Chamber. 
History, politics, public economy, questions of national se- 
curity and progress, were passed in succession before his 
wondering hearers, like scenes exhibited in a magic lantern. 
As usual no topic was omitted, every question was mar- 
shaled in its proper place and orderj and the House never- 
theless exhibited no signs of fatigue ; they hung upon his 
words. On several^ccasions in pauses of his speech, after 
he had continued speaking for nearly three hours, they in- 
vited him to rest, not from fatigue on their part, but from ap- 
prehension of his physical powers being exhausted. " Re- 
pose- vous en pere," exclaimed several deputies. He pro- 
ceeded, however, to the close without suspension. 

At the death of Casimir-Perier in 1832, he was made 
Minister of the Interior, during the Belgian troubles, and the 
Vendee insurrrections. In this position he was fortunate ; 
he did no mischief and won some glory. He was now 
broken into public business, and exchanging the portfolio of 
the Interior for that of Commerce and Public works, every- 
thing prospered which he engaged in ; but his efforts were 
directed chiefly to the completion of popular public works. 

In the disturbances of the Republican party, in 1834, 
Thiers discovered more courage, and redeemed his charac- 
ter in a measure, from the reproach of cowardice incurred 
by his flight.in 1830. 



382 BIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDA. 

At this time he quarrelled with Marshal Soult, and had 
the better of him in abuse. Soult sent in his resignation. 
His successor had the same difficulty, and it appeared that 
Thiers, if not a brave man, was at least a very quarrelsome 
and abusive one when it suited his humor to be so. 

Guizot and the Due de Broglie met the same fate, and 
could not keep place with him. He now began to be abused 
on all sides, and soon had no party, a condition which pres- 
ently forced him to resign. He now went over to Lafitte 
and the Opposition, as was natural, after seven years of 
monarchism ; and now found time to prepare his histories 
of Florence and of the Consulate. 

In 1840, in consequence of a difficulty on the part of 
Guizot, Mole, and Broglie to agree with the Royal policy, 
Thiers came again into power. In the Syrian affairs he 
discovered no prudence or decision, and lost influence, but 
the fortifications of Paris were easier to be carried through 
by the shrewd king and the cunning minister. By the pop- 
ular discontent he was again ejected and Guizot succeeded 
him. It is said that since his fall from favor he is much 
more of a radical ; but whether he is or not seems to be a 
matter of extremely slight importance. 

It is said of him that he has but one fixed purpose in life, 
and that is to advance himself. 



XJ 






^^'*^tfiSMV^^:'^ 






iv^i^O 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

lllllll 



019 626 348 2 



